Technology Sales, Service, and Solutions Provider IBC 2013 ANNOUNCEMENT ROUNDUP: AJA VIDEO, BLACKMAGIC, AVID, QUANTUM

50,000 professionals from over 160 countries met this past weekend at IBC in Amsterdam for what is widely viewed as a “must attend” event for entertainment professionals in content creation, management and delivery. There were a number of exciting announcements from technology providers including Avid, BlackMagic and AJA to name a few. 4K products continued to be a huge topic of discussion as well as all things “cloud.” Here are some of the highlights from what was a whirlwind of technological innovation on display!

AJA previewed The Thunderbolt 2-enabled Io 4K. The new adapter will support 4K, Ultra HD, HD, and SD capture and playback via Thunderbolt 2 connection, enabling 10-bit 4K video output from the Mac Pro.

Specs include 4 bi-directional 3G-SDI and 4K/UHD HDMI I/O, allowing for realtime 4K to HD down-conversion, using AJA's industry standard conversion and scaling technology. With compatibility for Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Creative Cloud, AJA Control Room, and Telestream Wirecast 5 this promises to be one of the most comprehensive and flexible 4K devices on the market. Not yet ready to ship, you should see the Io 4K arrival around the same time as the new Mac Pro

AJA also showed off the new TruZoom software and joystick control for AJA's Corvid Ultra video platform. This offers a simple way to define and extract a 16×9 region of interest within a 4K frame and scale it to HD in real time. It's primarily designed for broadcasters working with real-time signals from 4K and Ultra HD cameras, but also works with uncompressed files.

AJA also released a new set of Mini-Converters:

4K2HD - an external 4K to HD downconverter providing 4K material to HD-SDI and HDMI outputs simultaneously.

V2Digital and V2Analog - analog video to digital video converter and digital video to analog video converter.

HD10A-Plus - High Quality HD Analog to HD-SDI Converter

Avid

Avid announced the ISIS 5500 (the successor to ISIS 5000) is now available. It provides exceptional scalability, performance, media access, sharing, protection and real-time collaboration. The new 64 terabyte (TB) engine doubles storage capacity at the same price point as the ISIS 5000 32 TB system, delivering the value that media organizations urgently require. Further, Avid will continue to offer a 32 TB system at a 25 percent reduced rate. Specific features and benefits include:

Exceptional scalability – A new 64 TB capacity that complements the existing 16 and 32 TB engines provides efficient, linear bandwidth scaling to sustain performance, making it easy to scale workgroups, bandwidth, and capacity. Media organizations can connect up to 90 content contributors at the same time, and scale workspaces and storage from 16 TB to 384 TB of raw storage, with up to six ISIS Engines and 1.8 GB per second of bandwidth.

New ISIS 4.5 software– Also available to existing ISIS 7000, 5000, and 2000 customers via a simple software upgrade, ISIS 4.5 software provides:
Real-time access, editing, and sharing ISIS-stored media using Red Hat Linux 6.2-compatible applications
Connectivity to ISIS online and nearline storage using Windows 8 clients
Increased file count, with up to eight million files for ISIS 5500
Enhanced File Gateway service to share all workspaces
ISIS 2000 scalability - to five engines for up to 1.2 PB of nearline storage
Failover protection with support for dual System Directors in ISIS 2000
Real-time collaboration – Allows media organizations to connect their creative professionals in distributed and complex workflow environments, enabling contributors throughout the facility—or around the world using Interplay Sphere—to work together using the same media assets.
Tight integration and more open workflow – Provides maximum production efficiency and flexibility with tight integration with the AirSpeed® ingest and playout server, Avid Interplay® asset management, and Avid editing workflows. With support for many third-party applications, including Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, users can easily integrate ISIS 5500 into existing infrastructures.
Reliable performance – Delivers the same simultaneous media access, dynamic storage allocation, and reliable linear scaling as ISIS 7000, while intuitive, web-based system management tools provide an easy, reliable way to store assets, accelerate editorial, and scale capacity, access, and bandwidth.
Support for HD and high-res files – Enables media organizations to house a vast amount of SD, HD, and other high-res content from a variety of sources and make it readily available everywhere.
Interoperability – ISIS 5500 family of products use the industry proven ISIS file system and is backward compatible with existing ISIS systems. ISIS 5500 engines can be added to existing ISIS 5000 storage systems providing investment protection.

BlackMagic

BlackMagic announced a lot of new Ultra HD products this year.

First, a new model of the ATEM Production Studio 4K, which was the world's first Ultra HD live production switcher, was showcased (or announced). The new ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K includes features such as 10 independent 6G-SDI inputs each with frame sync, built in DVE with zoom, scale and rotate, 4 upstream chroma keyers, 3 independent aux outputs with front panel control and a larger media pool that holds both still frame graphics as well as motion video clips.

The SmartScope Duo 4K is a new, updated version of the SmartScope Duo, and now includes 6G-SDI connections, making it well suited for rack mount video applications and waveform monitoring in SD, HD and Ultra HD television formats. SmartScope Duo 4K features two eight-inch LCD screens in a rack mount design. Each screen can be switched between video monitoring or a choice of six scope displays including waveform, vectorscope, RGB parade, YUV parade, histogram and an audio scope with 16 channels of SDI audio and audio phase meter.

HyperDeck Studio and HyperDeck Studio Pro get an attractive machined metal front panel. HyperDeck Studio now features a built in power supply that replaces the external DC supply on the older model. HyperDeck Studio is the perfect SD and HD SSD recorder and player. HyperDeck Studio Pro is perfect for SD, HD and Ultra HD recording and playback. These models will start shipping next week.

The public beta for DaVinci Resolve 10 has been posted on the Blackmagic Website. Both the full version of DaVinci Resolve 10 is available, as well as the DaVinci Resolve 10 Lite edition. Resolve 10 is a major upgrade that includes new features for integrating the workflows of multiple different software products used in the film and television industry. Resolve 10 has upgraded on-set tools, upgraded editing features, support for OpenFX plug ins as well as new tools for delivering final project masters to cinemas. This is a free update for all DaVinci Resolve customers and has been called “the biggest update to DaVinci color correction in over 30 years.”

They also announced some exciting new models of mini converters with 6G-SDI connections so they can be used for any SD, HD and Ultra HD workflows. These new mini converters help build broadcast, live production and post production systems that are future-proof because you can switch to Ultra HD any time you need. There are 3 new models with 6G-SDI, Mini Converter Optical Fiber 4K, Mini Converter SDI to HDMI 4K and the Mini Converter SDI Multiplex 4K.

HyperDeck Software Update 4.0 adds additional ProRes formats to the HyperDeck Studio Pro model. The new formats are ProRes 422, ProRes 422 (LT) and ProRes (Proxy). This means users can go into the menu on the front panel and simply select the recording quality they want. With these new recording formats, users save on disk space.

Finally Blackmagic announced Desktop Video 10. This is a major software update for the UltraStudio 4K and DeckLink 4K Extreme capture and playback models. The software update gives these models new features, including simultaneous capture and playback. New architecture has been designed to be optimized for high speed Thunderbolt and PCIe computers, and the new emerging Ultra HD television formats.

This exciting update that will be available in October free of charge for all UltraStudio 4K and DeckLink 4K Extreme customers.

Square Box

This is a busy year for Square Box Systems. The company announced a new CatDV web client with a number of significant improvements providing even more deployment options, including public and private cloud. New functions include: upload and download of CatDV assets (hi-res and proxy), creation of cut lists / shot lists, sophisticated meta-data search and improvements to playback and marker handling. The rich (desktop) clients can now also use Web proxies in addition to LAN based proxies. Server plug-ins (using the CatDV Server API) are also supported in the Web Client (i.e. including the new consent form plug-in).

CatDV Pegasus launched amid much excitement. Pegasus is a premium CatDV client built on the foundation of CatDV Enterprise and includes built in support for MXF and archiving plus a brand new solution for integration with Avid Media Composer. It also includes metadata support for Red Epic files. Pegasus can co-exist with CatDV Enterprise clients and is available as a stand-alone product. The product is available now.

Two iPhone and iPad apps are now available - CatDV Browse & CatDV Review. CatDV Review provides a simple review and approve interface, whilst CatDV Browse lets users navigate through content and metadata in CatDV. The iOS applications use the Web Services API and requires at least one CatDV Web license to be available.

The addition of Consent Form functionality means CatDV can manage scanned or electronic consent forms so customers can be sure that the correct permissions have be received for their footage.

CatDV For TriCaster runs directly on the TriCaster platform and brings metadata management to this leading live Production and publication solution. Users can search the CatDV database and bring assets into the TriCaster for play out etc.

Quantum

Quantum announced StorNext 5 Appliances. Newly engineered from the ground up, StorNext 5 is the result of over two years of development. This promises dramatic new levels of performance, scalability and flexibility providing optimized support for IP, NAS, SAN, and cloud-based networks. The result is a complete end-to-end solution that combines best-of-breed file system technology with easy-to-deploy appliances to support complex and demanding digital workflows. StorNext 5 appliances will be available in December 2013. StorNext 5 software-only solutions will be available during the first half of 2014.