Working to Channel 7’s brief Gearhouse Broadcast’s Project Solutions division provided a high definition facility for the Open’s main courts of Rod Laver and Hisense for the first time in the history of the event. Standard definition facilities were integrated for the remaining courts. This year the tournament was bigger than ever before with seven courts used for the event instead of the usual six. A high definition/standard definition production was more challenging to integrate than previous standard definition broadcasts of the tournament. This was due to cross conversion of signals from HD to SD and SD to HD.

The entire Broadcast Centre was built into a large prefabricated structure which comprised of a massive 45 metre by 15 metre double story temporary building. Broadcast Centre housed all the technical facilities including the Production Control rooms, the Audio rooms and MCR. Overall there were nine Production Control rooms in the whole facility which consisted of seven court control rooms, one World Feed Control room and a Unilateral Control room for the host broadcaster Channel 7’s main output.

For the first time in 2009 a large EVS server was installed, which gave a non-linear, integrated solution for logging, archiving, editing and insert playouts during the host broadcast. This was achieved by using a total of 26 EVS XT2s and 22 IP Directors which linked into an Avid Unity server and Avid Adrenaline edit suites.

Saul Shtein, Head of Sport for Seven Network said, “The 2009 Open coverage was the best Tennis telecast I have ever seen and the wonderful ratings have endorsed what you are doing. To produce a telecast of this world class quality under the incredibly challenging conditions is a testament to your talent and team work. We thank the Technical team for not only keeping us on air when the temperature has been similar to midday on Mars, but also for keeping us cool when fire extinguishers in the compound were exploding due to the heat”.