LAS VEGAS—At this year’s NAB Show, Ross Video will announce significant news across its product range, with a few last minute surprises promised. The theme at its North Hall booth will be “Smart Production.”
Jeff Moore
“‘Smart production’ is all about how we can help our clients make their productions better,” says Jeff Moore, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Ross Video. “It goes beyond just products to the services and technology we can bring to make this happen.”
FROM TECH DEMO TO PRODUCT
One of IBC’s most intriguing tech demos was Ross’ Frontier virtual set, which featured a hyper-realistic rendering that appeared to be from Amsterdam’s Dam Square, with raindrops dripping down the outside window of the “set.”
“We had a number of visitors who were convinced the whole thing was a live shot, but it was virtual,” said Moore. Frontier is currently being used in Norway for an interactive game show by The Future Group, who developed the set in partnership with Ross.
For the NAB Show Frontier is now available as a product. Ross has years of real-world and product experience in virtual sets, and the addition of the high-end Frontier makes the range more complete. The Frontier Virtual Engine uses the well-established Unreal Game Engine, bringing photorealistic rendering, particle systems and physics to the broadcast virtual set, according to Moore.
VIDEO SERVERS AND REPLAY
At IBC 2016, Ross announced its acquisition of Abekas; the brand is being retained for Ross’ family of video servers as are all Abekas products.
Abekas Tria 2
New and shipping now is the Abekas Tria 2, a full 2-channel SSD clip server with an input record channel, synchronous playback of key/fill pairs or independent playout of two separate video channels with audio.
When the acquisition was announced in September, Ross also announced Streamline Play to bring MAM and MOS workflow to the Abekas Mira Production Server for news production. This is now available.
Also, Mira now includes “Mira Connect” GigE networking, enabling Mira Production and Mira Replay systems to seamlessly share content between servers. There is no need to cache or transfer files as they are seamlessly streamed on demand across the GigE network.
SWITCHER SOFTWARE
Switchers are central for Ross, and at the 2017 NAB Show, both Acuity and Carbonite production switchers continue to add significant new features through software updates.
Acuity v6.0 adds LiveEDL and Soft Panel operation. LiveEDL is great for “live-to-tape” productions, and is a “huge time saver” in post production, according to Moore. The new Soft Panel for Acuity provides full setup and operation from a web-based GUI, which means a physical panel is no longer required, saving money and space.
v12.2 software for Carbonite, now offers support for the compact CB9 panel in two-panel operation scenarios. Other new features include MiniME preset for enhanced UHD 4K production, support for the 1080p25 signal format, and thumbnail capture for media wipe selection.
ROUTERS & GRAPHICS
The Ultrix 12G router/audio processing engine/multiviewer adds 12G clean/quiet switching. New routing control panels include the RCP-QE Series remote control panel that offers 18 or 36 colored backlit graphic LCD keys with multiple menus.
At NAB, Ross will debut a v7.0 update of its XPression motion graphics systems, with support for Windows 10. IP inputs and outputs are now supported with SMPTE 2022-6 and SMPTE 2022-7 shipping on XPression Studio, XPression BlueBox, and XPression Clips systems. Support for video over IP workflows on XPression is available through a variety of hardware vendors, including AJA and Matrox.
XPression Datalinq—XPression’s universal data connector—ties together a wide range of data sources into XPression graphics templates, while the XPression Clips production clip player adds several features.
Ross will be in booth N3706.
