NAB Preview: Grass Valley Rolls Out New Fiber Transmission System, 3D Software Enhancement

The 2010 NAB Show will see two major innovations to further increase the flexibility of Grass Valley cameras.

First, a unique fiber-transmission system carries 1080p 3-Gbps signals from the camera to the base station and into the production network. The latest version of the fiber transmission system offers the capability for 1080p50 and 59.94 bandwidth: with a single fiber adaptor, the user of the LDK 8000 Elite WorldCam camera line can switch among 720p50/60, 1080i50/60, and now 1080p50/60. The products with the new fiber transmission system are already available at a price point of $135,000, including LDK 8000 Elite camera head.

Second, Grass Valley will unveil a 3D software enhancement of the standard camera-control panel. It enables two cameras to be controlled simultaneously so that stereographic shaders can control 3D pairs of cameras from a single control panel. The 3D OCP software will be available in April as standard.

Also on display at NAB will be ChannelFlex. Thanks to new capabilities in its AppCenter Elite software suite leveraging a highly flexible system architecture, Grass Valley has made it possible for all K2 Summit and K2 Solo servers to be expanded from handling four SD/HD video streams to as many as eight streams in specific applications, such as super slo mo, multicam recording, and even 3D. With a simple ChannelFlex software upgrade, every Grass Valley K2 Summit production client and K2 Solo HD/SD server can now be used as a 3D production server for 3D recording or replay, a 2x or 3x super-slo-mo recording device, or as a server for recording from two to six simultaneous camera angles with at least one channel for playback. The license upgrade for AppCenter Elite will be available in May.

Grass Valley has also added new features and functionality to its GV Connect plug-in for Apple Final Cut Pro users, which increases productivity and provides new performance benefits when working with Grass Valley K2 media servers and storage area networks. The latest version, 2.0, adds tighter newsroom computer integration with K2/Aurora news systems, via the MOS protocol, to tightly link scripts with audio and video clips, making digital news production easy and getting news content to air much faster and more efficiently. GV Connect 2.0 will be available at NAB. Existing GV Connect customers under warranty can upgrade their systems at no charge.

Visit Grass Valley at booth SL106 at NAB 2010.