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August, 2000 © Da-Lite
Screen Company,
Inc.
Volume 2 Issue 6
Tacos for 200
By Gary Kayye, CTS
Cooking for the family is stressful enough, but what if you had to
cook for the whole company? Or, for 90 people youíve never met?
Thatís what chefs at Specialty Brands in Riverside, California do
all day long. They are the cooks behind the cooks at many popular
restaurants, cafeterias and even fast food places. Specialty Brands, a
division of Oklahoma City-based Food Brands America Inc, is the nationís
largest supplier of pre-cooked Mexican and Italian food specialties
found in the frozen section of your average grocery store. Brands
include FREDíS, POSADA, ROTANELLIíS, BUTCHER BOY, LITTLE JUAN,
PACIFIC TORTILLA KITCHEN and MARQUEZ. In addition, Specialty Brands
supplies Mexican restaurants and even Taco Bell with quality fresh and
frozen food supplies.
You can imagine what it must be like to try to train 90 people at a
time on how to best prepare the latest burrito specialty. Well, thatís
exactly what Specialty Brands does in their new corporate auditorium. Itís
outfitted with a kitchen-style cooking area on the stage that includes
multiple cameras for IMAG (Image Magnification), which captures
everything the training chef does. Seating a little over 90 people, the
auditorium serves as both a cooking classroom and a corporate meeting
and training facility.
"They really had a true multi-purpose use facility there,"
commented Ken Margett, Senior Account Manager for Anaheim, CA-based
Integrated Media Systems. "The main functions of this room are
presentation, demonstrations, and corporate training and at the front of
the room is a Da-Lite rear-projection screen and mobile lectern. But, to
the right of the stage area is a cooking island where food preparation
is demonstrated live. Then, to complicate things a bit, directly to the
right of the large auditorium is the really nice dining room designed
specifically for corporate entertainment and testing."
Because all the lights in the auditorium needed to be on at all
times, IMS installed a Da-Lite 3/8" Da-Plex rear projection screen
with a double mirror system and a Proxima ProAV9320 3-chip LCD projector
delivering just under 3000 ANSI lumens.
"Jennie Guida from Da-Lite was extremely helpful." She came
out and specíd in product, got the drawing to the right people in
Da-Lite's engineering department and got me a quote in two days."
Three pan and tilt controlled Sony 3-chip CCD cameras were
strategically placed around the stage to capture an overhead view of
cooking range, right side of cooking stage, and left side of cooking
stage, allowing for IMAG no matter where the chef is standing or
cooking.
"Weíve done a lot of training facilities before, but nothing
like this," stated Margett. "Itís like the Cooking Channel
with an audience of 90 peers, but itís real life. This place is
actually used to train people that will go on to cook food that may
eventually end up on the menu at my local Taco Bell or as my next dinner
burrito. It was cool."
The mobile lectern serves as a control center as it houses an AMX
control system and a PowerPoint and Internet capable PC and monitor as
well as a document camera and a microphone system. Itís designed to be
moved virtually anywhere as the stage includes strategically placed
floor-boxes that can route the PC video, camera video, audio and control
wiring for the system.
The system itself is housed in a rack thatís located in a dedicated
AV room. Included in the rack, and capable of being routed to both the
Auditorium and the Dining Room, are a VCR, a DirecTV satellite system, a
CD player, a cassette player/recorder, a DVD player and a video
conferencing system. Finally, an electronic whiteboard is mounted on the
back wall of the stage and is used as an additional teaching tool, when
necessary. The whole thing can be controlled either via the AMX in the
lectern or via a remote wall-mounted touch panel in the rear of the
stage ñ for AV operator usage.
The entire system netted out to just under $200,000 (US) and was
installed by Integrated Media Systems of Anaheim, California. They can
be reached by phone at 714.688.7000 or via their web page at
http://www.imsav.com.
System Bits
Screen: 150" Diagonal Da-Plex Screen with Double Mirror System
Projection System: Proxima ProAV 9320
Video Sources: Sony DVD player, Sony VCR, Sony 3-chip CCD digital
cameras and a Samsung document camera
Video and RGB Routing System: AutoPatch Matrix Switcher and Extron
interfaces and distribution amplifiers
Audio Sources: Shure microphones and a Sony CD audio player
Audio Routing System: Shure mixer, Oxmore mixer and JBL and Atlas
Soundolier loudspeakers
Control System: AMX
Racks: Middle Atlantic
Floor Boxes: FSR
Video Conferencing Equipment: PictureTel
Lighting Control and Dimming: Lutron
Gary Kayye is Principal of Kayye Consulting a firm that specializes
in providing marketing consulting, telephony integration and training
development to the professional audiovisual industry. He spent 12 years
at Extron and AMX as VP of Sales and Marketing before founding his own
firm. He can be reached at www.kayye.com or via e-mail at gkayye@kayye.com.
He is also the chairman of the PETC ñ Professional Education and
Training Committee of ICIA.
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