NAB Recap, Part Four: Wednesday’s Reports

Visitors to the CAMERON PACE Group booth last week were bound to hear the term zero delta thrown around. But zero delta, or the point at which producing a 3D telecast adds no additional cost or disrupts none of the traditional workflows in the 2D production, is not just a hollow marketing term. CPG Co-Chairman Vince Pace believes it is a true possibility and is essential to the maturation of the 3D-production business.

Canon expanded the size of its booth to allow for a heavy emphasis on 4K products and workflows, and, given the interest in 4K cameras and related products, the expansion was more than justified. Canon’s C500 debuted at the show and is the company’s second 4K camera to be launched in less than six months.

Several new ultra-slow-motion high-speed cameras made their first appearance at the NAB Show, and Vision Research’s latest Phantom Camera, the v242, is among the most hyped for sports production. Although the Phantom Cam has been a regular production element for high-profile sports telecasts for years, it has recently made its way into more regional and second-tier sports shows.

Haivision reported that it has broken out of its LAN cage with an arsenal of new products, including the KulaByte Internet encoder. Acquired by Haivision last July, KulaByte delivers strong picture quality and uplink efficiency for streaming to Dynamic Flash and Adaptive HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) networks.

Azzurro Systems Integration’s AzzurroCam 3.0, the latest edition of the HD-camera series, features a completely new graphical user interface and gives users the ability to manage multiple remote sites equipped with single- or multiple-camera studio configurations from one or multiple locations.

First-time exhibitor Broadcast Sports Inc. (BSI) demonstrated its Dual Stream Mini Transmitter, which allows simultaneous transmission of two signals wirelessly and can transmit both as a live 3D feed. In 3D production, it ensures a synchronous signal from the two cameras responsible for capturing the footage for the left and right eye.

Australian DAW manufacturer Fairlight made some new-product announcements at the NAB Show, including the upcoming release of Version 4 of its Dream console software, which will incorporate such features as an integrated sampler designed for postproduction, mouse-based–editing enhancements, a dedicated single-screen GUI design for compact installations, and improved dynamics attack range, plus side-chains and MaxLinking across groups.

Quantum unveiled the Scalar LTFS (Linear Tape File System) appliance, which offers new modes of portability and user accessibility for archived content on LTO tape. It features a network-attached–storage frontend and is based on the LTFS open standard for content formatting. Since it works with existing application and file-system tools, LTFS-based content is safe for long-term data protection and archival storage.

At the NAB Show, Genelec released updates for its DSP systems: v.1.4.2 for the GLM system, making it Lion OS-compliant (OS X 10.7) for Apple computers, and v.1.3.1 for GLM.SE systems. Both systems are compatible for Windows 7.

For suppliers in the digital-asset–management business, one of the toughest challenges is selling a client on the importance of making the investment in a digital archive. Spectra Logic has seen a notable spike in interest in the storage and monetization systems it provides and highlighted its T-Finity and T950 data-tape libraries.

Music libraries are targeting sports-broadcast production with renewed emphasis via exclusively licensed music. Killer Tracks, one of the largest music libraries serving broadcast, announced at the NAB Show last week that it has been signing original-music artists and has been particularly seeking artists whose music pairs well with sports programming.

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