The 3.3mile long Intercity Istanbul Park is a motor sports race track in the Tuzla district of Istanbul, Turkey, which stages some of motorsport’s most prestigious international racing events.
The circuit complex is 5.338 km (3.317 mi) long, covering a footprint of over 2.215 million square metres (547 acres). Managed by the Turkish company Intercity since 2012, the venue hosts corporate events as well as motor races.
As is the standard at all motorsport venues, track safety is a priority and the venue wanted to explore ways in which they could make the most of their analogue camera system to best monitor and capture incidents on track. Datapath worked with Turkish AV specialist Egerate Electronics to provide a solution that will meet requirements both now and years into the future.
The Challenge
Intercity Istanbul Park has analogue cameras monitoring every corner, curve and straight piece of tarmac.
With all cameras feeding into the race control room, Operators in the room can view any section of the track to ensure racing protocols are being followed and to instruct necessary actions from any incident.
The race control room required a videowall controller that was able to observe all the analogue cameras placed around the circuit, and be able to process the PTZ (pan, tilt and zoom) functions of these cameras.
It was vital that, when racing cars enter any camera’s perspective, the operator should see the camera image and PTZ behaviour as ‘real time’ as they must control PTZ functions at the speed of the racing cars and do not have much time to adjust the camera.
Additionally, as the facility plans to upgrade the whole camera system to IP cameras in the near future, it was necessary to use a system that is capable of IP decoding, flexible and expandable.
The solution
Datapath VSN1172, fitted with suitable Datapath capture cards, was a perfect match for this project due to high performance, expansion possibility and reliability that it provides.
Hande Özkan, Product and Support Manager at Egerate, said: “It was vital that, when racing cars enter any camera’s perspective, the operator should see the camera image and PTZ behaviour as ‘real time’ as they have to control PTZ functions at the speed of the racing cars and do not have much time to adjust the camera. Datapath’s capture card technology and processing power allowed us to deliver a solution that exceeded the clients’ expectations and provide a safer racing environment.”
Datapath’s low latency video capture cards, combined with their VSN1172 videowall controller, allowed the race control operators to capture the analogue camera feeds. The VisionSD8 card is ideal for this role as one unit can capture up to 8 individual SD inputs. In this case, four of the cards allowed up to 32 of these camera feeds to be ingested into the system and then display onto the video wall. They could then combine these with other video sources via the VisionSC-HD4+ HDMI capture card, to be displayed together in flexible layout designs, from the WallControl10 software.
This solution also fulfilled the need for a system that is capable of IP decoding, flexible and expandable – allowing for additional sources such as television feeds, weather reports and any additional monitoring source to be easily added.
Andy Lee, Senior International Sales Manager for Datapath adds: “We are delighted to support Egerate and Intercity Istanbul Park with their solution, which allows for safer racing, along with the flexibility for future expansion of monitoring sources with minimal hassle.”
