Crystal Vision will be co-exhibiting with its distributor Ariston FZC on Booth Z5-116 at CABSAT 2018 to show the new control features of the Safire 3 real-time chroma keyer. At its best, and Crystal Vision's most popular product in the Middle East, the Safire 3 has been upgraded with improved live operation from the VisionPanel control panel making it even easier to use. Crystal Vision also brings a unique approach to the IP world with its MARBLE-V1 media processor and software apps, giving the flexibility needed to react to the changing requirements of IP.
VisionPanel, a 3RU Ethernet control panel for the Safire 3 chroma keyer, is designed to operate up to 16 Crystal Vision Indigo or Vision frames and is well suited to those products that need regular adjustment thanks to its physical controls. The recent enhancements to VisionPanel all result in faster and easier operation – useful for all products but particularly beneficial for Safire 3 in a live situation. Touch screen improvements include making it more responsive, replacing the two-step drop down menus with a one-step radio group style control and removing the requirement to go via the home screen to change menus: tabs for all the other menus within that menu group are now displayed. Knob improvements include swapping the coarse and fine adjustment (with it now defaulting to the more commonly-used faster speed adjustment) and a useful new cal function, where pressing down on the knob defaults the value of the slider being adjusted. Hard button improvements include reassignment of the right-hand hard buttons to get immediate access to some of the most frequently-used menus (Key Status and Gain and Spill) as well as to provide a chroma key on/off toggle, and making it more obvious which hard button needs to be pressed to select a particular board: the button for the board currently being controlled is now lit bright, while the board list on the touch screen now shows the hard button number in addition to displaying the board name.
A first for CABSAT is Crystal Vision's MARBLE-V1 media processor, a powerful platform to run products as software apps, which is how Crystal Vision is moving forward in the IP world. The MARBLE-V1 media processor is a purpose-built video over IP hardware that fits in the Vision frames. Crystal Vision makes it easy for systems to grow and mature with the transition into IP: to work with new essence-based standards like SMPTE 2110 (or to change the functionality of the product completely), the engineer just needs to buy a new low-cost app to run on the MARBLE-V1 hardware. The SDI6-IP-2022 gateway app encapsulates SDI to SMPTE 2022 IP to allow the transport of uncompressed video over 10GbE IP networks. It converts up to six HD/SD or three 3Gb/s SDI input connections and allows flexible assignment of the converted flows to either of the two output 10GbE links; alternatively the second 10GbE link can be configured for SMPTE 2022-7 redundant streaming. The IP-SDI6-2022 gateway app de-encapsulates baseband SDI from 10GbE IP networks. Supporting SMPTE 2022, it converts to six HD/SD or three 3Gb/s SDI output connections, with flexible assignment of the converted flows from either of the two input 10GbE links; alternatively the second 10GbE link can be configured for SMPTE 2022-7 redundant input streaming. Broadcasters are discovering they have all sorts of new issues to solve using IP, and the unique IP-IP-2022 IP to IP translator app – which features up to four bi-directional 10GbE IP network interfaces – is ideal for any SMPTE 2022 applications where network settings need to be changed in some way, such as network address, multicast to unicast and protocol translation. The IP products' useful features include clean switching between flows, sophisticated synchronizing (including PTP support), unicast and multicast transmission support, signal status monitoring, up to ten frames of video delay and IP traffic shaping.
The Indigo hardware products still have a huge range of high quality cards and frame sizes. Cards include chroma keyers and logo keyers, embedders/de-embedders, synchronizers, video delays, routing switches, up and down converters and color correctors.
Based at Whittlesford near Cambridge in the UK and with an office in the USA, Crystal Vision provides a full range of interface and keyers and helps people transition through a range of technologies, from SD to HD and from HD to IP.
