The latest high-definition production equipment from Grass Valley is being used to produce comedian George Lopez’s new late-night talk show “Lopez Tonight” on the TBS network.
Sweetwater Video Productions has set up a doublewide production trailer outside the studio in Burbank, CA, and outfitted it with a Grass Valley Kayak 2.5 M/E HD video production switcher and Grass Valley K2 Summit production client server.
Prerecorded footage is acquired in the field as an MPEG-2 file using XDCAM HD (at 50Mb/s) cameras. The file-based workflow facilitates the efficient production of video segments and fast turnaround times by editing in that same XD CAM 50 format with Avid media composer workstations.
The sequence is then sent across a network via a transfer engine and automatically imported into the K2 Summit server as a natively supported codec. By using the Grass Valley AppCenterPro file management applications suite (a standard feature on all of the company’s servers), the segments are played to air from a four-channel Summit server. The Kayak is used to switch all of the various video sources for the live-to-tape show, including graphics and a mix of live and prerecorded material.
The K2 Summit production client includes HD/SD operation, smooth slow-motion playback and up to four bidirectional channels in a 2RU chassis. The server features playback of DV, MPEG, HD and SD content with built-in aspect ratio conversion and can provide 20 hours of HD or 80 hours of SD internal storage or connect to a shared SAN.
