September 27, 2013
David Gibbons set as luncheon keynote speaker at SMPTE 2013
HOLLYWOOD, Calif.–Ustream’s David Gibbons will present SMPTE 2013 the Industry Luncheon keynote at SMPTE’s technical conference and exhibition Oct. 22-24 in Hollywood. Gibbons will describe the infrastructure that underpins the largest live Internet broadcasts and the technical limitations and opportunities inherent in this powerful delivery medium.
Gibbons is responsible for guiding the evolution of Ustream’s online live video solution as it expands to meet the needs of thousands of broadcasters from entertainers to consumers and from TV companies to non-profit organizations. Prior to joining Ustream, Gibbons held management positions at online video company Ooyala and at audio/video production equipment vendor Avid Technology. He has guided product strategy for multiple product lines, generating more than $300 million in annual revenues. He studied electronic engineering at the National University of Ireland and audio engineering at Kingston University in London.
Snell’s Vega Platform boosts routing flexibility in EMAV OB Unit
READING, U.K.–Snell announced that EMAV, one of Portugal’s leading production companies, has installed a Vega routing platform in one of its midsize OB vans in order to maximize routing capacity and flexibility. Vega is the industry’s most flexible asymmetric routing solution in a 4RU 192-port chassis and allows the EMAV OB production team to configure any signal port independently for fiber or coax (copper) connectivity, and to configure any signal port as either an input or output. The system was supplied and installed via Snell’s Portuguese channel partner, Amperel.
“Snell’s Vega platform gives us a great deal more flexibility in routing configuration and fiber/coax connectivity, in turn enabling our staff to meet even the most complex customer requirements,” said Miguel Amorim, technical director at EMAV. “We can add only the fiber connections we need, with different ‘flavors’ of wavelength, thus making the most of our I/O ports. The ability to increase our routing capacity without the higher costs and space demands of conventional routing solutions gives us a critical competitive advantage in the OB marketplace.”
With services based in Portugal and expanding across Europe, EMAV can send its OB vans to cover a wide range of live events, ranging from sports to cultural and political events. The company’s skilled operators and technical engineers already work with Snell’s Kahuna multi-format production system, IQ Modular infrastructure, and RollPod control panel in meeting the exacting demands of EMAV clients. The addition of the Vega routing platform and complementary Luna panels, both integrated with the OB unit’s RollCall control and configuration software, enables the team to employ ports most cost-effectively according to the demands of any given application.
The fully asymmetric I/O port designation of the high-density Vega routing platform enables EMAV to configure the router with just one input and 191 outputs, 191 inputs and one output, or any combination in between. The system leverages proprietary algorithms to monitor every subassembly continuously. To ensure maximum redundancy, it offers a full range of options — dual crosspoints, dual controllers, dual power supplies, and dual fans — all of which are hot-pluggable or replaceable. Each pair of ports consists of a receptacle cage that accepts a very small plug-in module supporting either fiber (LC-type small form-factor pluggable or SFP) or copper coaxial (HD BNC) connectivity.
Vega’s ports can be configured simply and quickly, so EMAV operators can choose the appropriate connection medium on the fly. Convenient support for fiber connectivity without the need for external converters makes it easy and affordable to maintain high data rates over long-distance links. The Luna LCD panels installed along with the routing platform feature a rotary encoder control knob for user-friendly “paging.”
SGL, Glookast enter into integration project for workflowCINCINNATI–Software Generation Ltd (SGL), a provider of content archive and storage management software for media and entertainment, has announced a major integration project with Glookast, a developer of modular tools for the design, transition and implementation of multi-format, multi-resolution and multi-vendor MXF-based digital workflows. Glookast is using SGL’s XML-based API to integrate its Gloobox and Media Retriever solutions with SGL FlashNet. The combined solution is slated for shipping Q1 2014.
Customers are constantly looking at ways to improve and simplify workflows while reducing costs and this integration has a number of key benefits. Glookast’s Gloobox provides a family of scalable, modular ingest and workflow enabling systems that allow multiple resolutions of material to be ingested and sent to multiple destinations. Integrated with SGL’s FlashNet archive this means that a high-resolution and/or source resolution version of material can be written directly to the SGL FlashNet archive system while a lower-resolution proxy version is automatically written to production storage such as Avid ISIS. This process removes the traditional method of ingesting high-resolution material, creating a low-res proxy and then sending the high resolution material to the archive.
Once the material has been ingested via Gloobox, the customer can then edit using the low-resolution proxy available on the online storage system. Upon edit approval, Glookast’s Media Retriever, a dynamic partial media retrieving and conforming engine, will look for matching high-resolution material from the sequence and retrieve those elements either from the nearline or the archive storage systems. Editing effects are automatically accounted for and are maintained after the high resolution conform process.
This integration provides a complete and reliable online, nearline, archive workflow solution that delivers significant cost savings due to simple integration with the Avid ISIS and Interplay systems. By enabling the highly efficient use of online storage, the system has built-in capacity for future expansion. This collaboration also provides the user with a system that can adapt and develop new production archive workflows.
Fox Turkey opts for Grass Valley SolutionsHILLSBORO, Ore.–Fox Turkey, a major entertainment and news channel broadcaster based in Istanbul, Turkey, is upgrading its existing Grass Valley production and playout system to include a new selection of flexible, cost-effective, and upgradable Grass Valley technologies that will enable edit-in-place capabilities, enhance the delivery of high-quality HD content, and improve production workflows. The upgrade will take place without any interruption to the station’s current playout channels.
The upgrade will include a GV STRATUS nonlinear media production tools that will control playout to the daily production studio, the addition of two K2 Summit 3G standalone playout servers to offer greater internal storage and enhance the delivery of material to the production studio for daily news output, a new RMI-Ingest station for the ingest of P2 based material, and an expansion of the production network.
This upgrade will also include enhancing Fox Turkey’s pre-existing K2 SAN system in order to double its capacity and bandwidth capabilities. The addition of two K2 Summit 3G Media Clients will connect to the K2 SAN system to support eight more bidirectional SDI-I/O channels for the ingest of HD and SD material. Furthermore, Fox Turkey will add two extra EDIUS editing workstations (connected to the K2 SAN as SAN clients), which will seamlessly integrate with other Grass Valley hardware and software to provide comprehensive interoperability with the K2 Summit server and storage platform and GV STRATUS tools.
TVB Hong Kong upgrades with PlayBox Technology
LONDON–PlayBox Technology announces the completion of a major upgrade to the playout facilities at the studios of Hong Kong’s largest independent broadcaster, Television Broadcasts Ltd (TVB). The project, which also included customer training, was completed together with the engineering team from Mediatech (International) Ltd, the local PlayBox Technology partner, and was finalized with the installation of 26 servers at the network’s headquarters in TVB City, Kowloon. The installation encompassed nine high definition 24/7 channels. Seven of them are already on air and the others are in precommission testing
Twenty of the servers installed consist of PlayBox Technology AirBox and TitleBox, for playout, with character generation and graphics. Eighteen are configured with 1:1 redundancy level for main and back-up operation on the nine high-definition channels. Control of the nine high-definition channels is via Multi Playout Manager, a fully assignable monitoring and control system. Two redundant Multi Backup Manager servers were added to manage redundancy switching on an existing Snell Aurora router.
An additional pair of servers have been installed for use in staff training, again as main and backup.
PlayBox Technology also supplied four single-channel CaptureBox servers, each with additional playout software installed for video quality control and verification. Once content is approved, it is automatically sent to two 16 terabyte network-attached storage servers, configured for main and redundant operation.
Each channel incorporates a PlayBox Technology SafeBox automated content transfer management tool which replicates remote content to local playout server folders for safe playback. The role of SafeBox is to manage wipe lists coming from the TVB traffic department and to purge the unnecessary content. PlayBox Technology developed playlist converters specially for this project. These convert the playlists coming from TVB’s internally-designed traffic system and from an existing Harris Automation to match the PlayBox Technology playlist format.
