Grass Valley bets on live production in 4K HDR

As the industry shifts to 4K UHD, broadcasters are managing a hybrid of SDR/HDR formats and a mix of HD and 4K UHD content, requiring a solution to manage them effectively in a consistent workflow.

An IBC 2017, Grass Valley is demonstrating the monitoring, signal conversion products Densité UHD-3901-UC, multi-display Kaleido-IP and Densité HCO-3901-4K quad-link change over, which allow channels to make the transition easily and at affordable costs.

The Densité UHD-3901-UC card provides cross-mapping between SDR and HDR, plus cross-conversion between HD and 4K. What's new in IBC is that the convenience of converting to 1080p has been added. Likewise, the Kaleido-IP multi-viewer offers a solution to easily monitor a mix of SDR, HDR and 4K UHD signals for playback. Finally, to ensure high availability during 4K playback, the HCO-3901-4K quad-link change over manages multiple streams to distribute a 4K signal into a single control point.

Densité UHD-3901-UC allows customers to wow viewers with the best HDR image quality, while they decide if or how they will switch to 4K. For example, when a television channel needs to produce content in 4K UHD but has a mix of 4K, 3G and HD cameras, Densité UHD-3901-UC provides the ability to create a common format for the final production. It offers a market-leading density of 24 UHD upconverters in a 4RU frame and provides signal normalization, ensuring external sources work within the workflow.

Densité HCO-3901-4K is designed to manage four 3G SDI (quad-link) streams at the same time to distribute a 4K signal with a single point of control. Supports 4K UHD quad-link switching with embedded audio and metadata with the option of clean switching operation. Additionally, ALC (Automatic Loudness Control) eliminates unpleasant loudness variations between programs and advertisements and offers customers a solution to protect their signal during blackouts.

Kaleido-IP offers broadcast facilities enhanced monitoring capabilities by adding SMPTE ST 2022-6 support in 10G, 25G and 40G. With the addition of SMPTE ST 2022-6 and the proposed ST 2110, Kaleido-IP now supports all IP formats, so compressed, uncompressed and OTT can be easily monitored using just one platform. Kaleido-IP also offers the ability to monitor up to 32 HD HEVC for streaming and playback installations, choosing HEVC/H.265 due to its higher bandwidth efficiency. This monitoring capability and versatility sets the standard for IP monitoring on the market and offers users maximum flexibility, regardless of production size and scope.

Catchment

Grass Valley introduces enhanced live production solutions with extensive HDR support at IBC 2017. To efficiently record, distribute and archive live content, Grass Valley has added three new compact models to its LDX C86N Series compact camera portfolio and enhanced the K2 Dyno Replay System to offer the smallest footprint per channel of any 4K playback solution. All of these new solutions complement Grass Valley's market-leading support for native capture and processing (HDR), helping to deliver pristine images to viewers.

In addition to these newly enhanced options, Grass Valley's complete live production portfolio offers content solutions in any format at all stages of the broadcast production chain. Some of these solutions, including LDX 82 HD/3G Cameras with extended dynamic range (XDR) capabilities and Kayenne K-Frame S-series production switcher with full multi-format support, including 1080p and 4K UHD, will be demonstrated in the live production area of ​​the Grass Valley booth at IBC.

iTX Appliance 2+

iTX Appliance 2+ is the latest in the powerful scalable playout solution. The trend of high-quality production for premium sports and events has seen demand for UHD playout greatly increased. To respond to this need, the new iTX Appliance 2+ model has been added to the range.

Combined with ITX's ability to play more than 25 file formats in the same playlist, including the recently added Apple ProRes, broadcasters have the flexibility to launch services on a single platform simply by adding a new software license.

As part of the latest iTX 2.12 software release, the powerful Vertigo graphics option is now available in UHD and the popular secondary recording option (which allows live events to be captured without requiring a separate recording port) has been enhanced to capture UHD files.

Broadcast Data Center

As broadcasters are under pressure to produce diverse content in more environments than before, flexibility in broadcast solutions has never been more important. The rise of digital streaming and social media increases demand for more formats, and as production teams work to shift to IP, they are juggling more types of workflows with SDI, IP, or a combination of both. To respond to these diverse and ever-changing needs, Grass Valley, a Belden brand, has cultivated strategic relationships and developed key solution enhancements that are part of the Broadcast Data Center to ensure broadcast networks' network systems leverage the benefits of COTS hardware platforms and effectively support the growing need for 4K and HDR workflows.

At IBC 2017, Grass Valley is showcasing multiple parts of the relay data center: GV Node v2.1 and GV Convergent v1.3, both of which support the proposed SMPTE ST 2110 standards; the IPG-4901 gateway, which normalizes IP signals sent to GV Node; the KMX-4921 Kaleido multi-display, which is fully integrated into the GV Node platform and provides monitoring flexibility for HDR content; and Cisco Nexus 9200/9300 IP Media Network Kits.

Access to the IBC 2017 SPECIAL in Panorama