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The AOL/Time Warner Center in New York City is a landmark building. The 750 feet, twin-towered multi-use complex, also named Columbus Center houses the AOL Time Warner World Headquarters, a luxury hotel spaces for retail, entertainment, restaurants and offices, luxury apartments, as well as CNN live broadcast production studios, and a concert hall. Throughout the entire center, there are closed circuit televisions and cameras tied into the control room.

The AOL/Time Warner security control center is state-of-the art facility, built in line with a trend to more sophisticated systems in an age where there is an increased awareness of security issues. The facility is designed to be a "safe area" to protect and monitor sensitive security monitoring equipment during a disaster or security related incident.

ETC, the project integrator, chose the SuperView® 3000 processor for its real time multi display functionality. Its high quality video processing made it ideal. Additionally, the ability to easily save settings and window positions as "presets" met initial functional requirements.

The security room is set up so that the 250 cameras placed throughout the center plus CCTV signals are sent to a Panasonic 850 Switcher. From there the signals are switched into SuperView-12 processors, each capable of displaying up to twelve signals simultaneously on six wall mounted 50" plasma screens. The SuperView processors are controlled by a workstation created by ETC specifically for the center. At any given time, up to 72 images can be displayed. The SuperViews' presets allow the controller to display at the push of a button anywhere from one to twelve signals in a variety of window arrangements on any of the six screens.

Frank Lloyd of ETC said of the SuperView: "The response has been impressive. The quality of the video has been exceptional, and it met their expectations." He added that the SuperView, "was a very user friendly product."

The SuperView multi-input display processor accepts up to twelve real-time inputs and displays the combined output on a single high-resolution monitor or projector. The window inputs can be NTSC or PAL, composite or S-video, and high-resolution analog RGB with up to 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution. Each window can be independently positioned, scaled to full screen, overlaid with computer graphics or overlapped with other windows. Additionally, the user can pan and zoom within each video image.

Time Warner Inc. is a leading global media and entertainment company with best-in-class businesses in filmed entertainment, interactive services, television networks, cable systems and publishing. They can be reached on the Internet at timewarner.com.

ETC is a non-proprietary provider of access control, security, CCTV, fire/life safety, and communication systems. They can be reached on the Internet at etc-us.com.