Grass Valley delivers comprehensive HD solution for venue, sports video and audio creation demands

Grass Valley is looking to take advantage of the HD revolution is moving beyond the big-time broadcasters and is beginning to take root in arena video systems and smaller-scale live remote production.

And while broadcasters are faced with the challenge of playing within the ATSC HDTV standards those who don’t distribute HD over traditional broadcast streams have a whole new HD world to play in.

“DV smashed the barrier for low-cost acquisition and now HDV is a stepping stone that makes us feel strongly that the same rapid adoption we’ve seen of HD technology in the broadcast market will be seen in the professional market,” says Jeff Rosica, Grass Valley SVP, marketing. “And because they’re in fully controlled environments the ProAV market can use HD in ways that broadcasters can’t, like immersive 3D blending and digital signage.”

Three Grass Valley products, the Turbo storage system, Indigo AV Mixer, and Edius nonlinear editing software will work hand-in-hand with the upcoming Infinity tapeless acquisition system to deliver cost-effective workflow for everyone from high-school sports and small-college video productions to pushing content to high-end stadium and arena scoreboards and luxury suites

“The Indigo AV Mixer, for example, is not a switcher but rather a blend of three technologies,” says Mark Nverson, Grass Valley live production product marketing director. “It has a production switcher that looks like a typical panel with effects and keys for a TD familiar with those systems but also a seamless switcher that can display a variety of signal input types on screen without delay. And then there is an eight-channel audio mixer so the user doesn’t need a mixer on the side.”

In addition, Indigo doesn’t require a scan converter, format converters or sync generators, delivering maximum buck for either an SD version with two keyers ($14,000) or a high-res version with DVI and HD-SDI ($16,900). The SD version includes both 2D and 3D DVE while the high-res version has 2D.

Steve Wise, Grass Valley POE product marketing, says the goal of the lineup is to help ProAV users easily edit, store, and play HD and SD material with minimal training and cost.

The Edius software, for example, takes advantage of Canopus proprietary codecs to deliver native resolution video to the timeline. The result? Content doesn’t have to render into another format, allowing users to begin editing material almost instantaneously, an important feature in fast-paced sports applications. Users can also do mixed format editing on one timeline and an HQ codec is available for passing up to six HD streams over an SD infrastructure.

“I believe the move to HDV will parallel the DV revolution of the mid 1990s,” says Wise. “It’s all about higher-quality and lower- cost content creation.”

Other new features for Edius include creating multiple sequences within one project. Users can break a show into chunks, editing the open, end, and middle independently and then pulling them together automatically on a master timeline. And a multi-cam mode allows up to eight isolated cameras to be stacked on top of each other on the timeline for hot cutting from one camera to the next and then building the shots onto one timeline.

The Turbo system is also making the move to HD with the ADVC-HD series, converting HD-SDI to HDV or HDV to HD-SDI with embedded audio. That allows the Turbo to be used as an HD-SDI source with the Grass Valley K2 server or Kayak production switcher. “It encodes to an MPEG2 transport stream at full 1920×1080 resolution,” says Wise.