Canal Once Taps Grass Valley to Prep Workflow for 4K/IP Production

In a recent renovation of its news studio, Canal Once, the first public service television station in Latin America, installed a number of advanced solutions from Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, to streamline its news production workflow and prepare for 4K/IP production. The modernized studio is now the first of its kind in Latin America for a government-owned public channel.

Canal Once produces four daily newscasts Monday through Friday in addition to talk shows, educational programs, documentaries, recorded clips, and kids programming. Canal Once upgraded its news studio with Grass Valley’s GV STRATUS production asset management toolset, EDIUS editing software, Karrera K-Frame production switcher and the Kaleido-MX 4K ultra-high-definition multiviewer.

“As a long-time user of Grass Valley products and solutions, we have a very high comfort level with the technology and know that it’s the right investment for us,” says Oscar Baldenebro, operations director, Canal Once. “GV STRATUS is the perfect turnkey solution for us that works as designed—tailored to our needs.”

GV STRATUS is a full set of production tools in one application, designed for simplicity, efficiency and speed. Its task-driven tools operate in a variety of environments and can be specifically tailored for each user’s job function, helping users to increase efficiencies and enable more effective collaboration throughout the entire production lifecycle. With GV STRATUS, Canal Once saw an immediate shift in its workflow to an industry-standard way of production and broadcasting for its newscasts.

EDIUS delivers deep integration with GV STRATUS and gives operators real-time, multitrack, mixed-format editing, compositing, chromakeying, titling, and timeline output capabilities—eliminating the need for conversions, processes and extra components.

“When we decided to look at solutions that would give us the option to migrate to 4K and IP, Grass Valley just made sense,” adds Baldenebro. “Their switcher and multiviewer are 4K/IP capable, so we can upgrade on the fly with no new hardware or software needed. This solution is a very cost-effective approach for us and a sound investment for the future.”

Preparing for the future with 4K and IP, Canal 11 selected Grass Valley’s Karrera K-Frame production switcher. Karrera is a modular, powerful and scalable switcher, reducing the complexity of today’s production workloads while providing the flexibility to meet future demands. With the addition of 4K 1-wire IP connectivity, Grass Valley is enabling production workflows in IP in either 4K/UHD or HD. The TICO 4K 1-wire implementation is ideal for production applications because it is visually lossless even after multiple codec passes, and it creates far less delay than other compression formats. The K-Frame video processing engine is ideally suited to transitional, hybrid IP/SDI environments, as it can handle IP and SDI video formats seamlessly. Kaleido-MX 4K is an ultra-high-definition multiviewer that can natively drive a 4K display for the most demanding monitoring applications.

Canal Once selected the equipment after working closely with Grass Valley’s reseller, Excelencia en Comunicaciones y Tecnologia S.A. de C.V.

“This tailored solution for Canal Once helps to simplify their complete production workflow, from the camera to distribution of content,” says Leonel da Luz, vice president of sales, Latin America, Grass Valley. “The team at Canal Once will now be more efficient and will be well positioned to adopt future formats with a platform that will make the transition to IP seamless, when the time comes. It’s really all about keeping our customers ‘Future-Ready’ as they evolve their businesses.”