Compix Media, DNF Controls Team Up to Provide One-Touch CG Control

Compix Media, a developer of professional-quality character generators for the broadcast industry, has teamed with DNF Controls to provide an integrated solution for automated delivery of timely information to air. An intelligent interface between Compix Media’s character-generator product line and DNF Controls’ Universal Switch Panel (USP) gives users the ability to generate automatically updated text-based graphics with a single button press.

“Compix Media has built its reputation on providing all the functionality its customers require in an affordable character generator,” says John Duggin, president of DNF Controls. “The integration of the company’s products with our control technology brings even greater convenience and ease of use to implementation of CGs in many types of environments.”

All of Compix Media’s current character-generator products can be operated remotely by DNF Controls’ USP via industry-standard protocols, including Intelligent Interface and Graphics Programming Interface (GPI). The USP is a 1RU panel of multipurpose pushbutton switches that can be configured easily using an off-the-shelf Web browser. When the USP is integrated with Compix Media products, each button can be preprogrammed to recall a particular pre-built template and automatically fill out that template with text from a specific document within a watch file.

“A great example of the USP single-button capability in a sports application is triggering a pre-created graphic that says GOAL!!!, SCORE!!!, or TOUCHDOWN!!!, for the sports-venue large screens,” says Lan Merrill, director of technology at Compix Media. “This one-button real-time reaction to an event could be made extremely simple with Compix CGs and the DNF Controls’ USP panel.”

Pricing on the interface ranges from the mid $6,000s for analog single-channel to less than $27,000 for full-HD dual-channel Live Video Graphics.