Snell Previews Product Offerings for CCW/HD World 2011

Today’s broadcast and media facilities require smart, adaptable, and straightforward solutions as they transition to digital, HDTV, and 3Gbps operations. Addressing these needs, Snell will showcase a variety of products at CCW/HD World that offer greater automation capabilities and more flexible media handling in live production and playout.

“Broadcasters are having to adapt to a changing market environment,” said Jonathan Goldstein, president, Snell Americas. “While channel counts grow and new distribution platforms emerge, engineering budgets aren’t keeping pace. As a result, broadcasters are forced to achieve greater efficiencies from their operations. At HD World, we’ll show targeted solutions that directly address this need for efficiency — from production to playout — for broadcasters of every size.”

On its booth, Snell will highlight the latest enhancements to ICE, the company’s IT-based content delivery platform. The Kahuna 360, the world’s most powerful production switcher, is being shown for the first time at HD World, along with the Sirius 830 multi-format hybrid router and the Archangel Ph.C HD real-time restoration system for archived video content.

The Snell Kahuna 360 is a powerful production switcher, offering up to six full M/Es, seven keyers per M/E, 120 HD/SD inputs and 64 HD/SD outputs, and a clip-store with 40 minutes SD or eight minutes HD. The switcher can support up to 16 simultaneous broadcast productions from a single mainframe. With a native 1080p/3G switcher, Kahuna 360 supports any format in, any format out, on any input or output. The Kahuna 360 features unique Make M/E technology, which makes it easy for the operator to leverage available mixer power and create a tailor-made M/E — selecting inputs, keyers, stores, DVE, and outputs — for specific production requirements.

The Sirius 830 routing switcher is the newest member of the state-of-the-art Sirius 800 range of multi-format, expandable, hybrid routers. The Sirius 830 offers a compact 15-RU, 288 x 288 frame size for mid- to large-scale studio or OB productions, with the ability to add an additional 140 independently controllable multiviewer outputs. The Sirius 830 features high-performance modules for flexible routing of SD, HD, ASI, and 3Gbps signals. In addition, the Sirius 800’s unique approach to redundant crosspoint protection allows a single redundant crosspoint card to protect against failures on multiple crosspoints, providing the highest level of resilience.

Archangel Ph.C – HD is an advanced restoration system for SD and HD video and film-on-video archive content. It provides real-time dirt, dust, noise, scratch, instability, and flicker removal as well as film grain management. It unlocks the value of existing assets and ensures that SD and HD content can be distributed in superb quality. The restoration system brings significant improvements to users’ workflows by maximizing the amount of restoration that can be completed in real time and achieving lower cost than frame-by-frame restoration.