Extron NAV Pro AVoIP System Elevates Mt. San Antonio College Aquatics Center and Gym Complex

A significant feature to the NAV system is its capability to scale because the videowalls need to receive specific resolutions. With the NAV scaling decoder, the required resolution is delivered without having to install additional equipment in Mt. SAC’s challenging gym and pool environments.

Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) ranks as a top community college in California. At 421 acres, this 75-year-old college is one of the largest in the state and it continues to expand to meet a burgeoning student body. It is a two‑year institute of higher learning that offers approximately 400 degree and certificate programs and more than 50 student clubs and organized sports opportunities. As part of this campus expansion, Mt. SAC built a state-of-the-art gymnasium and aquatics facility, and integrated innovative technology.

CHALLENGES

This Mt. SAC complex totals approximately 145,000 square feet over two levels. The gym has main and auxiliary court floors, a weight training room, locker rooms, and more. Both courts can accommodate competition basketball, volleyball, wrestling, and badminton. The main court provides seating for 1,500. The aquatic side includes a 59‑meter competition pool for swim meets and water polo, a 30‑meter teaching, practice, and diving pool, four competition diving boards, a heated therapy pool, and upper-level seating for 2,500. The AV installation had to link and enable overflow among all spaces, while the scoreboards and digital signage had to be on the same system.

The second floor of the gym includes the Wellness Center, a VIP lounge, and an expansive exercise area open to students, faculty, staff, and the community. It offers a vast array of weight training equipment, three yoga studios, an indoor running track, and multiple classrooms, offices, and meeting rooms.

It was important that content would be available for distribution to displays throughout the complex. Background music had to be audible, yet mutable by space. In addition, classrooms, meeting rooms, and certain other spaces required presentation and matrix switching solutions.

It was going to be almost impossible to do all that we wanted to with a traditional matrix system, so we chose NAV because it allows us to virtualize the matrix environment and it's not limited to the physical location of the matrix frame.

System requirements included support for HDMI and USB C^® source devices, as well as SDI associated with broadcasting. Additional needs ranged from wireless collaboration to streaming capabilities. Bandwidth was another concern because Mt. SAC runs a converged network with as many as 24 VLANs per switch. An additional design challenge was the need to support a wide variety of displays and videowalls running at various standard and custom native resolutions.

Some of the environmental challenges within the complex were heat, humidity, direct sunlight, and sudden impacts from flying balls and rapidly moving student athletes. Since this region is subject to power outages, the AV distribution solution had to be incredibly rugged, stable, and system recovery after a blackout had to be quick and painless.

Working with design consultant Production Access Group, the Mt. SAC design team determined that the best-in-class solution was Extron NAV^® Pro AV over IP and control systems.

DESIGN SOLUTION

Centerpoint Communications was brought in to deploy the complex-wide NAV Pro AVoIP system, providing full AV functionality on the converged network. The different systems, such as NAV, Dante, and control, are each on their own VLAN.

The installation also features a distributed TV system for entertainment and current events. Selectively mutable BGM music plays within the rooms and throughout the complex.

There's an inherent latency you can expect with video over IP, but we’re just not seeing it with NAV.

NAV Delivers Everything and Under the Buzzer

The complex's NAV system currently consists of 93 endpoints and is expandable. It links the main gym, multi-purpose gym, main pool, dive pool, and an array of other NAV endpoints in various rooms. Centerpoint used one NAVigator Pro AV over IP System Manager with a LinkLicense^® upgrade to configure the encoders and scaling decoders en masse, saving time and streamlining setup. Each NAV endpoint is defined by location and a unique identification name. The support team also uses NAVigator to monitor and manage the entire NAV Pro AVoIP system from a central location.

Video and other content can be distributed to any combination of displays across the facility, including the scoreboard videowalls, 12 other LED videowalls, auxiliary displays, digital signage, and a myriad of individual room displays. NAV 1G encoders that support HDMI, Ethernet, and USB bring content from the scoreboard computers and various other sources into the main system.

With so many types and sizes of displays, standardizing on one or two common resolutions was not an option. For example, the 20-foot-wide display in the gym has a resolution that is higher than 4K. Thus, a 4K signal is sent to the NAV scaling decoder and it scales the image to that videowall's native resolution. Each NAV scaling decoder is configured to output the optimal resolution to match the native resolution of each videowall and flat panel display. The NAV scaling decoder also supports the AES67 audio steam.

Extron’s NAV is our comprehensive distributed networking AV system, leveraging its many features, capabilities, and performance with latency and switching speed that puts it on par with a presentation switcher.

Environmental Impacts

The robust design and build of NAV endpoints help protect connections when a wild ball dislodges or breaks a display or knocks a local source device to the floor. Also, the NAV decoder's low profile made it easy to secure it behind a display.

To protect the videowalls, displays, and supporting AV components around the open-air pools, the equipment was enclosed in surround mounts that shield against rain, high heat, condensation, and direct sunlight. The NAV endpoints are powered over PoE+, which added another layer of environmental protection and streamlined integration.

Going the Distance with NAV

The NAV system also allows overflow coverage between spaces. NAV enables camera feeds and content related to an event held in one space to be shared to one or more spaces. A common occurrence is for the coaches to pull up any of the scoreboards or camera feeds for viewing on their conference room display.

As an example of content distribution during an event, a competition at the dive pool can be shared with an audience in an overflow space anywhere in the complex such as the Training Room. This room is on the opposite side of the complex, and the displays are typically used for digital signage, entertainment, and presentations from a laptop. The NAV encoders and scaling decoders extend feeds and related content from the pool area to these displays. This flexibility allows audience members to watch the heats and monitor diver performances from remote locations. For large events such as a championship wrestling tournament, the main competition is held in the gym and the various competitors and teams warm up in the wrestling room and the multipurpose gym. NAV enables the wrestlers to track their upcoming matches and monitor their team standings in the lists. Spectators in the second-floor VIP lounge use an Extron TouchLink^® Pro touchpanel to select camera and scoreboard feeds for display on the room’s display system.

If there’s a network issue, we let NAV tell us what and where it is rather than take the time to go to the individual network closets; the system runs beautifully.

To address bandwidth concerns, Extron’s PURE3 Intelligent Selective Streaming (ISS) technology leverages periods of low-motion video content to achieve extremely low bitrates while maintaining virtually lossless video performance. It significantly reduces the bandwidth, eliminating throughput capacity concerns with the encoders and decoders. PURE3 allows more streams over Mt. SAC’s converged network without sacrificing video quality.

Each of the competition spaces has streaming capabilities, with four Extron streaming media processors per space. The NAV system sends content and camera feeds to each media processor, including data from the scoreboard computers.

The captured video is archived and made available for selective distribution over the NAV system. The volleyball coach finds this extremely helpful, using two cameras and processors to teach proper player stance, positioning, and ball handling techniques. Coaches also connect to the NAV system to review recordings and supplemental content, using one of the TouchLink^® Pro touchpanels to preview the streamed content and select what to send to a room’s display or videowall.

The NAV system also extends AV signals to the network closet that facilitates signal conversion to SDI for broadcast purposes. Broadcast trucks can take any of the available ports as a broadcast input feed. The reverse is available as well, with a broadcast feed being pulled into the facility’s broadcast bunker for extension over NAV to one or more endpoints. Broadcasts are frequent occurrences at Mt. SAC. As an example, the wrestling team is the defending state champions, so this year’s tournament to be held at Mt. SAC is already on many broadcasters’ schedules.

In the main gym, the PTZ camera system is connected to an Extron streaming media processor with an integrated 400 GB solid state drive. The processor captures and distributes the live action for local display over the NAV system. This design enables live video of an event to be sent to other destinations on campus and feed the broadcast network.

The new gym and aquatics facility helps us with recruiting and to work on statistical analysis and performance, using the big screens to see what’s happening during practices and competitions.

Custom Control with Extron

AV system control is over its own VLAN. Extron IP Link^® Pro xi control processors work in union with TouchLink Pro tabletop touchpanels in varying sizes. Each environment dictates the color of the touchpanel and the GUI.

While based on the campus standard, the user interfaces are customized to the unique requirements for the complex’s differing spaces and rooms. Centerpoint used Extron Toolbelt and GUI Designer software to configure and customize the control interface for the gyms, pool areas, athletics rooms, Wellness Center, and VIP lounge, as well as the lobbies, conference rooms, classrooms, and other spaces throughout the complex. The control system is configured for easy navigation. Depending on the control demands of each space, an Extron IP Link^® Pro control processor efficiently manages commands and quickly routes communications.

How To Make Designing, Commissioning, and Troubleshooting a Breeze

Some designers feel that a project design review is unnecessary, tedious, and sometimes annoying. But there are many good reasons for it. Network environments are complex, and a simple error can lead to system nightmares. The Mt. SAC team found Extron’s design review process to be beneficial, saving time and aggravation before integration even began. Extron’s engineers in the Network Technologies Support Group caught a few things that were missed during the initial design phase and suggested corrections, such as optional topologies and allowing NAVigator to manage the endpoints.

If the campus experiences one of the frequent regional power outages, the NAV system is the first to be back online, speeding up full installation recovery. NAVigator securely configures, manages, and controls the NAV endpoints. It facilitates easy configuration, updating, and backups of all NAV endpoints concurrently. Custom presets ensure that each NAV scaling decoder is sending the correct resolution to the connected display.

Extron customer service is always top notch. When we had questions, issues, or just needed clarification when working with the new environments, we never felt we were on our own; Extron was with us every step of the way.

Extron AV Switching Systems Present Rooms with a View

Several spaces within the complex, from conference rooms and classrooms to targeted activity areas, are equipped with local AV switching and distribution systems, as well as wired and wireless AV connectivity. Many of these rooms utilize an Extron presentation matrix switcher. For example, a DTP CrossPoint^® 4K 8x6 matrix switcher supports the Wellness Center, enabling set top box and digital signage feeds to be sent to one or more of the room’s multiple displays. A DTP^® decorator-style wallplate transmitter mounted on one wall enables personal devices with HDMI and/or analog audio outputs to be connected to the AV system. Another DTP CrossPoint 4K presentation matrix switcher provides video scaling and distribution for the VIP lounge, sending content to the display system within the room and the outdoor display on the VIP patio.

The complex’s conference and meeting rooms and the flex use space each include an Extron eight-input 4K/60 HDMI scaling, seamless presentation switcher, with some larger rooms adding a DTP eight-output distribution amplifier. A ShareLink^® Pro collaboration gateway facilitates wireless connectivity in these systems. Rooms such as the Active Learning Lab include an eight-input scaling presentation switcher, breaking away the audio from the source signal to send it to an Extron Dante audio interface and on to the NAV system. Four-input scaling presentation switchers, with built‑in DTP2 inputs and outputs for signal extension, provide convenient AV signal routing within diverse spaces such as the gym’s activity room, training room, matt room, and aerobics studios.

Each room’s AV system is controlled using one or more Extron TouchLink Pro touchpanels, which work in harmony with an IP Link^® Pro control processor. Many rooms include an Extron 10" wall-mount TouchLink scheduling panel outside the main entry that allows the space to be reserved from the door or through the AV control network.

The NAV system allows us to drop an endpoint and expand our virtual matrix wherever the network can exist, which these days is anywhere and everywhere.

RESULTS

The gym and aquatics facility was the final project for the new Mt. SAC Athletics Complex East. It offers complete sports programs and workout opportunities that contribute to healthy minds in healthy bodies. Additional uses include hosting a full schedule of state championships and CIF games on campus.

Anywhere there is a network connection, the NAV system can provide an on ramp or off ramp for matrix switching. According to the Mt. SAC athletic program teams and support staff, some of the most valued features and capabilities with NAV are endpoint naming, ease of use, and the way that the virtual matrix environment is set up. Without physical switchers to monitor and maintain, there are fewer breaking points in the complex-wide installation.

Future plans include routing multicast traffic with NAV, which is already a capability of the Pro AV over IP system. Segregating the networks will allow everything to have an IP range that is localized to just that space.

Meanwhile, the new complex played a key role in aiding the school to secure Nike’s sponsorship, highlighting the high quality of its comprehensive sports education program. Mt. SAC’s gym and aquatics complex provides the ideal athletic environments to help champions thrive.

Our new gym and aquatics facility, with its cutting-edge AV technology and videowalls, is a collective achievement of my staff, coaches, student-athletes, and the unwavering support from our administration and Board of Trustees.

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