CCW 2015: New Cobalt Digital Cards Designed for Maximum Performance in Minimal Space

From its full range of cards for the openGear platform to its Blue Box Group line of stand-alone interface converter boxes, Cobalt Digital is known for scalable, cost-effective real-world solutions for demanding production and broadcast environments. At CCW 2015, Cobalt Digital will showcase an assortment of these solutions and introduce two more: an RGB color-space corrector and a dual-channel frame sync card.

“The northeastern U.S. market is vital for our business, and CCW gives us unique access to this market to showcase our space-efficient cards and frames,” says Robert McAlpine, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing. “This year at CCW, attendees will get a firsthand look at two more of our high-density problem-solvers: an RGB color-space corrector and a dual-channel frame sync card.”

New Products at CCW 2015

New and Improved 9978-ANC-MON Ancillary Data Monitoring Probe
New and improved for CCW 2015 is the Cobalt 9978-ANC-MON 3G/HD/SD-SDI Ancillary Data Monitoring Probe. The 9978-ANC-MON is an easy-to-use, economical solution that offers comprehensive ancillary data monitoring and probing to validate and ensure the expected presence and handling of ancillary data in SDI streams. The Cobalt Digital engineering team has updated the user interface to provide 15 status fields and boxes that can be sized and positioned anywhere on the screen. Users can select the status (AFD, LKFS, video format) and which source (Input A-E) to use for each status box. The probe also features five timecode burn status boxes. Because the input video PIPs can be sized and positioned anywhere on the screen, the card can be set up for a wide variety of monitoring applications, with the user maintaining complete control over how much status is displayed for up to five inputs.

Another major improvement introduced for the 9978-ANC-MON is SCTE104 logging. The probe’s onscreen display shows the last three SCTE104 messages received, as well as the time each message was received and the time elapsed since the last message. In the dashboard area, Cobalt Digital has added tree views of the last three messages that allow users to drill down into the message fields.

The card supports an on-screen display of the dialnorm metadata for a user-selectable Dolby pair, displays measured LKFS, and supports closed caption decoding/overlay. These three features were not shown at the 2015 NAB Show but will be highlighted at CCW 2015.

New 9922-2FS 3G/HD/SD-SDI Dual-Channel Frame Sync and Text-to-Speech Option (+TTS)

The Cobalt 9922-2FS 3G/HD/SD-SDI Dual-Channel Frame Sync represents the highest- density frame sync card in the openGear family. It provides audio and video processing, AES/analog audio embedding and de-embedding, and CVBS I/O with two signal paths of frame sync on a single openGear card. Channel density can be as high as 33 channels in 2 RU when the card is deployed in the OG3-FR openGear frame, or up to 40 channels of advanced processing when housed in Cobalt’s HPF-9000 20-slot high-power openGear frame.

Key features of the space-saving 9922-2FS include the ability to add RGB color correction, set auto-changeover to invoke failover for basic input loss, and “moving-box” insertion over input video or internally generated test patterns for active picture verification.

Cobalt Digital’s award-winning text-to-speech software option (+TTS) is licensable to the 9922-2FS dual frame sync card and other Cobalt openGear cards including: 9902-UDX, 9922-FS, and 9932-EMDE. The +TTS option can be downloaded to the following standalone BBG-1000 boxes: BBG-1002-UDX, BBG-1022-FS, BBG-1022-2FS, and BBG-1032-EMDE.

The Cobalt Digital +TTS option is a complete 21CVAA text-to-speech solution comprising an integrated, self-contained single-device system with no added dedicated units or baseband audio patches. Its sophisticated text-to-speech synthesis provides realistic male- or female-versed voice conversion within a single unit and without any baseband intermediate breakouts or patches between the audio module and the host device.