Roland VR-50HD is Rock Solid at Portland Art Museum

Located in the heart of Portland’s cultural district, the Portland Art Museum is a preferred venue for many of Portland’s most prestigious social gatherings. Its spacious ballrooms and sculpture mall with a host of preferred caterers lends itself to hundreds of events and exhibits per year that include auctions, concerts, and keynotes.

Luke Buchanan is the lead audio visual technician at the museum and is in charge of AV production from medium sized meeting rooms to the Grand Ballroom with seating capacity up to 1000 people. Buchanan and team were looking for a switcher with more versatility to replace the FSR CP-200 that they currently had in the Ballroom. They were looking for a switcher with scalability capable of handing a wide range of video formats that could meet the needs of their diverse clientele.

The Roland VR-50HD’s flexibility, multi-format capabilities, built-in multiview monitor, HDCP compliancy, picture quality and most important, affordability were key factors in the selection. The VR-50HD was installed into the Grand Ballroom, the largest performance space at the Museum with lighting grid and theater stage.

“We did not see anything on the market with the input/output types and number of formats supported with a useable interface like the Roland VR-50HD,” says Buchanan.
“The scaling has been awesome. We have not had any problems with any video signals connecting to the VR-50HD and Roland has made it very simple to get a signal on a screen in a matter of seconds. The VR-50HD makes sure that everything is scaled properly on the output which is very important for our setup.”

To produce the diverse range of events, Buchanan says they most always use four inputs, a still image key for logos, picture-in-picture and then send HDMI/DVI out to a fiber converter directly to a Barco 18K projector. The Aux output function on the VR-50HD is very useful when they want to use more than one screen. An Aux is also setup from time to time for isolated video recording simply by assigning an HDMI or SDI out of one of the camera signals. For a recent production, a client wanted a three-screen setup with two sides and one rear. The powerful Aux function on the VR-50HD saved them from having to rent a matrix switcher because the client only wanted the screen in the back of the room to show a camera during the keynote. The rest of the time they wanted slides on all of the projectors. To accomplish this they simply assigned the camera to the Aux bus with SDI out to the rear projector and in the VR-50HD menu assigned one camera source to the Aux. The Aux out was set to follow program most of the time except when the keynote was up. This solution worked flawlessly and they were impressed that there were no flicker issues when they switched to the Aux buss during the keynote.

The Audio capabilities are equally valuable to the museum production team. The ability to mix both analog audio sources and digital audio from HDMI or SDI has saved them a lot of DI boxes as most of the computers used have HDMI out. Buchanan decided they could run both audio and video through HDMI and then break out the audio separately on the VR-50HD. Leaving the audio levels at unity, Buchanan takes two XLR’s out of the VR-50HD into the house audio console. The audio console is essentially changing the volume level up or down for the PA speakers. Having the audio signal stay all digital until it comes out of the VR-50HD means no susceptibility to ground hum or other interference eliminating the most prevalent types of audio noise problems.

Buchanan concludes, “The VR-50HD is a new product and you can usually expect some problems at first, but it has been rock solid. It has never flunked a show, and we have never lost anything during a show. It has been a rock solid part of our setup and we know that we can rely on it.”

For more information about the Portland Art Museum: www.portlandartmuseum.org.