Inspired by the original Brooklyn Bowl in New York, the 1000 capacity Brooklyn Bowl at The 02 in Greenwich, London incorporates a concert venue, ten pin bowling, restaurants and bars. With five zones, each with a unique AV experience and live simulcasting of events from the adjacent 02 Arena this new entertainment space demanded an innovative acoustic and visual design.

Independent engineers, consultants and designers Vanguardia Consulting provided the full audio, video and lighting system solution for the Brooklyn Bowl, including the Roland V-800HD video switcher as the hub of the live environment. Having proved its capabilities at the Brooklyn Bowl in New York, the Roland V-800HD was specified in line with the client’s requirement to replicate the production quality of New York at the London venue.

The Brooklyn Bowl is intended to be ‘rider free’ so that performers use the installed AV equipment rather than bring in their own. The Roland V-800HD offered a flexible, multi-format solution which could cater for different engineers, setups and auxiliary equipment, fitting the ‘rider free’ environment well. The Roland V-800HD was also chosen as it is well known by industry engineers and they would feel comfortable using it. With a set up including multiple cameras, Blu-ray, Apple Mac Pro, multiple Macbook Pro’s, projectors and screens, the video switcher needed to have sufficient inputs. With eight multi format channels from sixteen inputs (4 SDI, 4 Composite, 4 DVI-I/HDMI, 4RGB/Component) and six outputs (2 SDI + 2 DVI-D/HDMI + RGB/Component + Composite), the V-800HD proved to be the ideal specification.

The Roland V-800HD acts as the hub of the live video production system at the Brooklyn Bowl which includes AMX matrix, Christie HD14K HD projectors, Panasonic PT-DW830WXGA HD projectors, NEC screens and Sony BRCZ700 cameras. One of the requirements for the Brooklyn Bowl was connectivity with the 02 Arena and this has been enabled over a direct fiber link. This direct video feed from the 02 Arena to the Roland V-800HD allows events to be simulcast in HD format via the AMX processor which controls the video distribution to all of the screens. This was demonstrated on the opening night with the Brooklyn Nets Basketball game – being played in the O2 arena – shown on the main screen in Brooklyn Bowl. The output video is sent from the V-800HD on demand via the AMX matrix to the screens allowing the venue to select which content goes to which screens in the different zones such as live stage, restaurant and bar areas.

The truly multi-format design of the V-800HD makes it ideal for this type of installation as it has the ability to connect to any type of source whether it be digital or analog, computer or video format. There is no need to match input sources to the output resolution as every input has its own broadcast quality scaler that can individually scale, stretch, crop and zoom each source as required to fit any output resolution chosen. The V-800HD offers full support not just for camera video, but for computer output as well -at a full range of resolutions. The V-800HD is HDCP compatible and also features a built-in multi-viewer output that provides a convenient monitoring solution when connected to an HDMI monitor.

“We’ve used the V-800HD before and were more than happy to do so again. The V-800HD delivers, met all our expectations and is hassle free,” commented Mark Murphy, Associate Director at Vanguardia Consulting.