At the Tektronix NAB2008 booth, the company introduced a 6lb. HD waveform monitor designed for stations launching actual high-def electronic news gathering operations.
The company developed the WFM 5000 after listening to its customers who needed a basic monitoring device that would satisfy the need to maintain the level of quality control over field acquisition they’ve grown to expect after years of SD newsgathering at a price that would not weigh heavily on their budgets, said the company’s John Hammerstrom. The WFM 5000 has a list price of less than $7000.
Besides offering a basic HD waveform monitoring function, the WFM 5000 also can be used as an HD vectorscope, picture monitor and status display for video and audio. It supports audio monitoring for 16 embedded channels of audio and one discrete AES pair and can be mounted to a tripod or atop a camera. At the booth, Tektronix showed the new waveform monitor affixed to a camera mount atop a camera as the unit might be used in real-life shooting situations.
According to Hammerstrom, the company has received thousands of requests from customers for an HD waveform monitor that would allow them to remain competitive with other stations in town without exceeding their HD infrastructure budgets.
At the MRC booth, I had a little fun ribbing Paul Furman, systems application engineer, about his badge which proclaimed him to be “The Greek God of Microwave.”
The tone went from jocular to serious when the conversation turned to the integration of IP technology into digital microwave links, however. MRC demonstrated a digital diversity receive package as part of an interesting, indoor mockup of the inside of an ENG van on the one hand and a ENG newsroom control system. more
Reporters in the field who edit their stories with Apple’s Final Cut Pro now have an easy way to input their raw footage into a MacBook Pro for editing.
With the growing presence of Final Cut Pro in newsrooms across the country, Matrox thought it was only natural to bet broadcasters would like to take the NLE into the field. From the appearance of its booth and the interest level in its new MXO2 interface box, Matrox won that bet. more
My last stop at NAB was at the VCI booth (SU727). There I met up with Jamie Meyer, the division manager for automation systems at VCI. I’d met with him briefly last year, but this was my first time to sit down with him and talk. What he’s excited about is that KEYE-TV, which uses VCI’s autoXe MC automation system, was just announced as the winner in the Station Automation category in the Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards.
Jamie says that what makes the system so strong is that the database is at the foundation. With digital content, the metadata surrounding content is becoming more important, he says, with the database as the foundation on which the applications reside. more
K*WILL is enabling broadcasters to seek out and find the source of lip sync problems wherever they occur. At its NAB2008 booth, the company introduced the portable VP3000, which relies on the company’s Video DNA technology to run signal analysis using double stimulus methodology.
The double stimulus approach compares an original signal source that is presumed to be error free to signal that’s been digitally process, such as a satellite feed or one that’s been encoded or decoded. Based on the original signal, the VP3000 can identify if there’s been any signal degradation, presumably caused by the signal processing. That way, broadcasters have a way to zero-in on the source of the lip syncing errors. more
This year Sachtler, now a Vitec brand, is celebrating its 50th year of offering support and camera head products to broadcasters and film producers. On display in a glass case at the booth was an original wooden-legged tripod designed by company founder Wendelin Sachtler circa 1958.
Fast forwarding to 2008, the company was highlighting its new SOOM HiPod system, a 12.7lb four-in-one camera support for electronic newsgathering (ENG) applications as well as the new Reporter 8 LED portable/onboard light and kit. The new LED light kit comes with two interchangeable LEDs — daylight and tungsten — and several other components, including an optical module to change the light’s beam angle.
In the Artemis range, the company showed enhancements for its ACT 2 spring arm, including springs that are easier to change out and new carbon fiber arms, which according to the company’s Ali Amahdi, allows the arm to be more stable as the speed of the user increases.
Axcera introduced the 6X Series liquid-cooled solid-state television transmitter that uses the company’s frequency agile exciter and LDMOS devices for broadband operation across the entire UHF band.
The showed a 6X transmitter that supports 7kW DVB-T, 10kW ATSC and 20kW analog operation on the floor. It will support power levels up to 30kW DVB-T and 40kW ATSC. According to company president David Neff, an important feature of the 6X transmitter is its relatively small form factor.
Axcera also highlighted the fact it’s supporting five different transmission technologies for mobile TV broadcasts with a red-hot car receiving mobile TV broadcast transmission as part of the NAB2008 demonstration of the technology.
Neff discussed mobile TV transmission, the final push to complete the DTV transition in the United States as well as a recently released report from research organization Centris showing that DTV coverage patterns may leave millions of viewers without over-the-air television reception.
I ended yesterday in the Fujitsu booth (SU10928), where I met with Dan Dalton, Fujitsu’s director of new product development. The big thing going on at Fujitsu is it’s new IP-9500 MPEG-4 AVC low latency encoder for HD satellite newsgathering.
He showed me a demo of how a user could put HD in an SD feed. There’s an option for low latency, encoding and decoding video content at less than 300ms. And it can handle HD video from as low as 4Mb/s and as high 27Mb/s.
Listen to an audio clip of Dan talking about the Fujitsu IP-9500.
Bitcentral unveiled Air Now, a backpack-based digital news gathering system weighing less than 10lbs, which will let a reporter transmit live reports via EvDO wireless channels from the field.
The product, according to the company’s Ken Lee, is like an ENG truck in a backpack. It consists of a laptop computer loaded with special encoding software, a cellular transmitting box and a battery that will power the unit for 2.5 hours. Air Now streams a live Windows Media 9 stream via an EvDO cellular network connection to an IP address at a TV station or elsewhere. According to Lee, the system produces useable results at data rates as low as 280kb/s.
I happened to be visiting Bitcentral when Andrew Lombard, chief engineer of McGraw Hill-owned KGTV in San Diego, was wrapping up a visit. Lombard said he was impressed with the performance of Air Now, and “looking down the road” could envision equipping journalists in San Diego and at the company’s Indianapolis station with the product. Lombard added he would help the company in its continued development of Air Now.
IneoQuest’s mission, according to Calvin Harrison, IneoQuest’s vice president of marketing and business development, is to create products for users that help them improve their ROI, deploy services quickly and decrease operating expenses. To that end, the company has created modules that monitor a signal and, when a problem occurs, pinpoint exactly where things went wrong. One of these products is the new Cricket 8-VSB, which offers confidence monitoring of 8-VSB broadcast signals. It provides verification and troubleshooting of studio-to-transmitter link and RF coverage area. Listen to what Calvin Harrison has to say about the Cricket 8-VSB.
The editors and writers of Broadcast Engineering post live from the 2008 NAB Show in Las Vegas as the news happens. Check back throughout the day for the latest in industry news, reports from press conferences and product introductions.
The company developed the WFM 5000 after listening to its customers who needed a basic monitoring device that would satisfy the need to maintain the level of quality control over field acquisition they’ve grown to expect after years of SD newsgathering at a price that would not weigh heavily on their budgets, said the company’s John Hammerstrom. The WFM 5000 has a list price of less than $7000.
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Reporters in the field who edit their stories with Apple’s Final Cut Pro now have an easy way to input their raw footage into a MacBook Pro for editing.
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