NAB Show Product Review: Automation & t Management

This year, nearly every NAB exhibit seemed to have some form of automation or management product on display, too many to thoroughly list in available space. New this year among automation and asset management exhibitors was a spirit of cooperation and consolidation. With the spotlight on several companies being bought and integrated, apparently many manufacturers saw the light and are working to make their products compatible with others.

AUTOMATION

Scott Rose (C) discusses Grass Valley's GV Stratus cloud enabled playout automation.

AVECO marked the NAB debut of its Redwood channel-in-a-box system, including Redwood Studio and Redwood Play, which both drastically reduce the capital costs of channel start-ups or expansion. It also showed its Astra Studio 2 production automation, including Astra MCR master control playout, Astra media asset management and Astra workflow management.

CINEGY gave its booth visitors a sneek peek at Cinegy 10, scheduled for release this summer. The company also launched its Cinegy Capture PRO, a centralized multichannel, scalable and cost-effective ingest tool using many of the components developed for and used by other Cinegy products. Cinegy Capture PRO unifies the task of ingesting material and generating edit or web proxies and supports many popular industrial codecs and file formats, including XDCAM HD 422, Avid DNxHD, High-Profile H.264, AVCI-100, MXF and MOV.

FLORICAL showed TheQ, an asset management application that provides several options for creating, editing, and managing both metadata and file structure of digital media content in the company's Smart Central private cloud application server.

GRASS VALLEY launched GV Stratus Playout, a cloud-enabled SaaS playout technology at NAB. Designed for critical automation functions, it is the core to Grass Valley's end-to-end integrated solution, managing the lifecycle of all media from ingest to playout by merging it all into a single workflow with the reliability of a solid-state playout server on a card.

Kyle Miller (R) gives a demonstration of Bitcentral's CORE: News, an integrated news production suite.

IMAGINE COMMUNICATIONS debuted SelenioNext, which can ingest precompressed content and transcode, package, encrypt and stream multiscreen, multi-device video. The company also launched MediaCentral, a software- and IP-based framework for enabling customers to migrate media and playout functionality to the cloud.

MASSTECH announced at the show that it is acquiring the assets of automation company PlayBox Technology. The company also announced a partnership agreement with Volicon to begin jointly selling Masstech media management solutions in conjunction with Volicon Observer broadcast compliance logging products.

NVERZION announced NVerzion NCloud, a new automation and media asset management system that utilizes a flexible, cloud-based solution to control, store, and monitor high-quality audio and video content anytime and anywhere.

PIXEL POWER introduced the Pixel Power ChannelMaster Duo, a new channel-in-a-box system that can deliver two independent channels from a single system.

PLAYBOX TECHNOLOGY announced enhancements to its AirBox universal playout and streaming automation server, now incorporating a GPU-enhanced graphics mixing engine which allows video rotation effects and depth-order layering effects to be performed in real time. The audio capabilities of AirBox are also expanded with support now for Dolby E and Dolby Digital Plus. The company also launched CaptureBox PRO, which enables multiple channels of HD or SD content to be captured from a SDI and IP sources.

RUSHWORKS debuted CTRL R, a touch screen PTZ camera control software application that controls up to 16 cameras, and runs on tablets or computers with Windows 7/8 operating systems. The company also launched VDESK LTD, a new entry-level offering based on the company's established VDESK/REMO integrated PTZ production systems.

SNELL introduced ICE-LE, a new version of the company's channel-in-a-box platform. It targets situations where space is at a premium, providing more streamlined functionality in a 1RU configuration. The latest version of ICE (v4.0), now provides twice the 2D or 3D graphics capability within a standard 2RU system.

VIZRT demo-ed the latest version of the Viz Mosart studio automation system, including tools for directors to instantly access content from any source and output to any location to help make easy on-the-fly decisions in an automated control room.

NEWS AUTOMATION

BITCENTRAL launched its Mobile Contribution Module, which extends field-based workflows with support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Mobile Contribution enables teams working in the field to instantaneously deliver video, images, scripts and other metadata back to the facility. The company's new CORE Active Panel is a simple dashboard that supports both AP ENPS and Avid iNEWS.

DALET DIGITAL MEDIA SYSTEMS unveiled a new release of its Dalet Xtend module for Adobe Premiere Pro CC. It lets Adobe Premiere Pro CC editors connect directly to the Dalet MAM platform. Also featured was a technology demonstration of Dalet integration with Adobe Anywhere.

ROSS VIDEO showed a new version of DashBoard, the company's free facility control software that controls everything from Ross openGear and DashBoard Connect partners and a variety of other UDP, TCP and HTTP devices. Version 6.1, launched at NAB, provides PanelBuilder, giving anyone the ability to build custom panels and automated workflows. Ross also introduced OverDrive Caprica, which adds the ability to control third party production switchers. OverDrive was paired with Ross' Inception News newsroom computer system to demonstrate a complete end-to-end news production workflow.

TRAFFIC AND BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

IMAGINE COMMUNICATION

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