Wednesday, February 22, 2017 [Ottawa, Ontario, Canada] - Ross Video announced today that it is planning yet another block-buster NAB as one of the anchor exhibitors in the Las Vegas Convention Center North Hall with a 9100 square foot booth packed with the latest live production technology. Following the theme of Smart Production, Ross will be showing how its technologies, services, and expertise can help customers achieve their creative, business, and technical goals. Ross displays at NAB will be a creative playground, showing the latest in complete systems and workflows for Virtual Sets, Automated Production, Graphics Creation & Playout, News Editorial, Stadium Display Production, Assembly Meeting Production systems, and more.Every Ross product family is bringing significant new product enhancements and major new product introductions to NAB this year. The scientists, engineers, and creative teams at Ross have been busy - the following is just a preview of some of the exciting things that will be on the booth this year. There will be more exciting announcements closer to show time.
Production Switchers
Acuity and Carbonite production switchers continue to add significant new features through software. At NAB 2017, along with other features, Acuity v6.0 adds LiveEDL and Soft Panel operation.
LiveEDL is great for live-to-tape productions. In LiveEDL mode, Acuity tracks source selections and creates a timecode locked edit decision list. This can then be exported as a file and imported to a non-linear editing system (NLE) along with camera iso-recordings, recreating the line cut in the NLE. Final changes are then easily made, saving massive amounts of time in the post-production process.
The new Soft Panel for Acuity provides full setup and operation from a graphical web user interface. This means the cost and space of a physical panel is no longer required, often desirable in automated environments like when deployed with Ross OverDrive Automated Production Systems.
Carbonite, the world's leading mid-sized production switcher adds v12.2 software. This brings support for the compact CB9 panel which can be added as a second control panel to a Carbonite for two panel operation. Other features included with 12.2 are MiniME preset, for enhanced UHD 4K production, support for the1080P25 signal format, and intuitive new thumbnail capture for media wipe selection. V12.2 software will be available at no charge to all Carbonite customers and made available to download from the Ross Video website.
Carbonite Black Solo adds v1.2 software, simplifying complex tasks such as keyer setup and panel layouts, and adds the Ross patented RGB PanelGlow that provides background illumination to make buttons easily readable in dark environments as well as enabling button color customization that allows the system to be personalized for at-a-glance color identification of busses and sources. As with all Ross production switchers this new software will be downloadable at no charge from the Ross Video website when available.
Video Servers and Replay
New since last NAB is the acquisition by Ross of Abekas, an iconic industry brand. The Abekas brand is being retained as the brand for Ross' family of video servers as are all Abekas products.
New and shipping prior to show time is the Abekas Tria 2. The Tria 2 is the next generation Tria clip server, a full 2 channel clip server with an input record channel, synchronous playback of key/fill pairs or independent playout of 2 separate video channels with audio. Tria 2 uses fast, high reliability Solid State Drives and is available with several drive capacities.
The Abekas Mira now includes Mira Connect Gigabit Ethernet networking, which enables Mira Production and Mira Replay systems to seamlessly share content between servers. There is no need to cache or transfer files as they are streamed on demand across the GigE network making it seamless to play a clip residing on one Mira to the output of a different Mira. This is a great way to scale your production replay team by adding more Miras and operators while making content easily available to all systems.
XPression Graphics
At NAB, XPression motion graphics systems jump to v7.0, which adds support for the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system for users building or providing their own hardware for XPression Designer, XPression Studio GO!, XPression Prime GO! and XPression Live CG.
IP inputs and outputs are now supported with SMPTE 2022-6 and SMPTE 2022-7 available (and shipping) on XPression Studio, XPression BlueBox, and XPression Clips systems. Support for video over IP workflows on XPression is available through a variety of hardware vendors, including AJA and Matrox.
XPression Datalinq XPression's universal data connector ties a wide range of data sources into XPression graphics templates. Datalinq adds support to parse JSON files as either an HTTP source using RSS or XML. JSON support is also available using a .JSON file in the local file system.
XPression Clips production clip player adds a number of new customer requested features. Server output channels now have a Preview Channel which is used to cue the next clip while the channel is still in use, and an Auto Cue function that automatically cues and plays the preview clip on the channel output when the current clip is finished. This added functionality enhances the ability for operators to randomly cue and play clips in a live environment within a single output channel. Another nice addition is a progress bar that adds both graphical and numeric indications of the time remaining in a clip. A time saver in production preparation is the ability to quickly Save a Still from any point on an existing clip in the Clips database and add it to the Clip Store.
XPression's INcoder transcode engine now passes original
