NAB Perspectives: Grass Valley’s Casaccia Sees Broadening Sports Support

Grass Valley may be under new ownership, but that isn’t affecting the company’s commitment to the sports market, according to Ed Casaccia, director of product marketing for servers and digital production.

“We are broadening our support, toolsets, and integration across multiple workflows for live sports production,” he says.

The biggest indicator of that broadening is further integration of the LDK 8300 super-slow-motion camera, which captures images at up to 180 frames per second with the Dyno storage and Edius editing platform.

“We have a whole environment of applications working together,” says Casaccia. For example, super-slo-mo images captured on the LDK 8300 and stored on Dyno can now be natively opened using Edius. Users can access metadata and also open playlists of content.

“We can now manage transfer of materials from one production area to another production area,” adds Casaccia.

Ronny Van Geel, director of product management for camera products, says the imaging side of things continues to advance, with the super-slow-motion cameras pulling double duty for the live broadcast. As for 3D, the company continues to support it in such areas as routing and switching, but camera development is not currently moving beyond simply providing two HD cameras for a 3D rig.

And encoding content for new distribution platforms like mobile phones and Internet streaming is also getting a bump, courtesy of MediaFUSE 2.0.

“We’ve put a lot of work into the dynamic streaming part and can stream content in Flash, HTML5, H.264, and Windows Media,” says Scott Matics, product manager for MediaFUSE and Ignite Live Production Solutions. “With a single encoder, we can support all those streams, and the broadcaster can also choose to stream an iPad channel at a higher bitrate and even change the pre- and post-roll or insert ads into the stream.”

Managed through Ignite, the MediaFUSE can also tap into content stored on the Dyno server, with clips added to a playlist generator. So, for example, fans can watch a constant stream of clips from a live event, focusing on the best parts of the event.

Routing needs are also getting some help, with the Trinix lineup adding two asymmetric frames (128×256 and 512×124) that can expand up to 1,024 crosspoints in fewer than three racks. Available in the third quarter will be a new multiviewer that requires an output slot in the frame and fiber-optic cards will be available in June. Up to eight multiviewers can be placed within a 256×512 frame or 16 in a 512×1024 frame. Most important, the multiviewer cards can be placed in any older Trinix router.

“When the Trinix platform was designed 10 years ago, the architecture was done without compromise,” says Steve Dupaix, director of product management, routing and signal management. “The multiviewers eliminate a lot of external gear and rack space, and the power consumption is up to a sixth less than competing systems.”