The Grass Valley booth is filled with new solutions and products.
The Thomson Grass Valley (SL106) press conference, seemed to have fewer news people than in previous years. Do you suppose even some of the news types couldn’t make the show?
Anyway, Jeff Rosica, senior VP of the Broadcast & Professional Solutions did the presentation. Typical Rosica style, read the prompters and make it all look good, which he did.
For you ‘young-ns’ out there, Grass Valley is 50 years old this year. For many of us, GVG is a name synonymous with quality products and excellent support. In that respect, things haven’t changed.
Kayenne
Tops on the MUST SEE Grass Valley new products list is the Kayenne production switcher. You can get a good first-look by picking up a copy of the April issue of Broadcast Engineering magazine from the bins or from our booth SL7609. Real eye-candy photography.
The Kayenne comes in 1.5 to 4.5 ME sizes with six keyers per M/E bank. The switcher provides 20 channels of DVE. That ought to be sufficient for any sports graphic TD.
Anyway, on to the Kayenne’s features. The operating surface is filled with new features. The key lighting is fully user controlled. If one operator wants all the cameras to show up with green buttons, presto, it can be so. If another TD wants the graphics input to be colored red for sports production and green for news, no problem. All the lighting is fully user adjustable.
The labels above button rows are all OLED, which produce crisp and bright user-assignable displays.
Each module in the panel is hot-swappable. Not that you’d ever need to, but an entire T-bar, ME bank or other module can be removed and replace all while the switcher is on-the air.
All this functionality comes in an 8RU assembly, drawing only 1KW of power. Look out trucks, here it comes.
LDK 3000 camera series
Grass also announced several new cameras and camera configurations. To meet the needs of studios and production facilities who need to shoot high quality HD, but are on a tight budget Grass Valley has launched the LDK 3000 camera series. This is its first LDK-family system camera application to use the in-house developed Xensium CMOS imagers – the same imagers first seen in the Infinity Digital Media Camcorder (DMC 1000).
The new LDK 3000 camera is built on the same physical platform and to the same uncompromised standards as the LDK 8000, but has been tailored to allow a lower price.
The LDK 3000 camera uses three 2.4 million pixel CMOS imagers, allowing the camera to switch between shooting 1080i and 720p. A low-cost commercial option will add the ability to shoot film-style in 25p and 29.94p. The LDK 3000 also uses the high-performing HD Triax transmission system to allow cable runs up to 1200 meters.
The LDK 3000 is physically compatible to the other Grass Valley HD cameras so it can utilize all existing accessories like the SuperXpander as well as be controlled from a standard GV OCP 400 over the company’s Ethernet-based C2IP control network. Camera price starts at $73,000.
