FOR-A, a manufacturer of video and audio systems for the broadcast and professional video industries, introduced the LTR-100HS Video Archive Recorder at the 2010 NAB Show. The new recorder supports LTO-5 technology, the latest standard in long-term, high-capacity tape storage, to provide a simple and effective archive solution.

Check out Broadcast Engineering TV’s coverage of the LTR-100HS here.

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There is a new player in the 3-D space and it’s Sensio Technologies. Sensio develops and markets stereoscopic 3-D digital compression and display formatting technologies. Sensio 3D allows the high-quality distribution of 3-D content through conventional existing 2-D infrastructures and playback/monitor on any 3-D display device. The Sensio 3D format is compatible with existing DVD and Blu-ray players and game consoles. While Sensio is not exhibiting on the show floor, you’ll be hearing more from this solutions company as 3-D further enters our space. More information is available at www.sensio.tv.

Avid announced that CBS News has selected the new Interplay Media Asset Manager module to streamline content-related workflows and improve visibility into its asset library. Through a tight integration with its existing Avid Interplay Production and Avid Unity™ ISIS systems, Interplay Media Asset Manager will enable CBS News to easily identify available tape and digital library media assets for use in its own broadcasts or make them available for sale to third parties.

Interplay Media Asset Manager enhances content-related workflows by allowing media enterprises to collect, index, catalog, manipulate, retrieve, and distribute rich media. Customers can gain greater visibility into their assets, work across teams and geographies, and build business processes adapted to their specific needs.

At Saturday night’s press conference, Omneon unveiled new components and enhancements across its product line and several collaborative partnerships.

“Our customers are being driven by business realities to simplify their workflows and leverage their video infrastructure more effectively in producing and distributing content,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Omneon. “Supporting the production workflow in its entirety, the Omneon platform offers the best of Omneon storage and processing technology, as well as the interoperability to support the strengths of tightly integrated third-party systems. A series of enhancements to our products and ongoing work with both clients and partner vendors have contributed to the refinement of the Omneon production platform and its value in today’s demanding media workflows.” more

Engineers, traffic professionals, and managers from all over the U.S. gathered at the MGM Hotel in Las Vegas last week to share with peers and hear about PBS plans for 2010 and beyond. The group of around 500 heard presentations on issues including file-based workflow, loudness, compression, traffic issues, grant writing, video quality monitoring, cloud computing, and more. Attendance was up from last year and sponsorships were sold out, pleasing all and allowing PBS to offer scholarships to personnel from a number of stations around the country.

A major focus of the conference is the status of PBS’ NGIS non-real-time distribution system, now in alpha testing by stations. The system will ultimately replace a large portion of its real-time distribution, which requires much of the national content to be locally recorded for later playback. NGIS will deliver content as files to a highly redundant IT-based system deployed by PBS at all 177 of its affiliates. PBS has developed a sophisticated automated workflow (Station Services Platform) that communicates directly with the station’s traffic system. Content is delivered to stations at least 48 hours before air dates, and the system will hold the content for 10 days afterwards to allow stations to copy the content to servers or archives for future playout. more

Calrec and 360 Systems

Every vendor at the NAB Show has a niche – a specific customer market it’s aiming for – and yesterday I had the privilege of meeting with two companies that are going for quite different markets.

First I met with Kevin Emmott, marketing manager at Calrec. What they had to offer were some serious, high-end digital audio consoles, most notably the new Apollo console. Despite the shaky economic climate, Emmott had the utmost confidence in Calrec’s client base and equipment. And when asked if the economy had led to any changes as to the company’s presence at the NAB Show he responded casually that if anything their presence had grown – upward, that is, with the addition of a taller, more prominent branded marquis. more

There are many new product announcements at the Ikegami booth. Among them are several additions to the company’s GFSeries of tapeless HD Flash memory production tools. On display at NAB 2009 are the GFCam HDS-V10 tapeless camcorder, which Bob Molczan, Ikegami engineering specialist tapeless products, pointed out features Bluetooth this year for instant export of thumbnail clips directly to a laptop application for fast logging, metadata insertion, and other workflow advantages. Also on show are the GFStation GFS-V10 Flash memory studio deck and the rugged high-capacity GFPak HD Flash-memory media. more

Jeff Moore, president of Ross Video, showed me several of the company’s new offerings for NAB this year, including the SoftMetal 3000 and 4000 series video servers. The next generations in the SoftMetal family are integrated media servers thatcome with I/O and storage all contained in a compact 3RU package.

The 3000 series is a Server Class Platform available in either standard or multidefinition versions. The 3000 series supports up to eight simultaneous record/play channels in SD and up to four simultaneous record/play channels in HD. It uses SATA drives and offers up to 14TB of media storage.

The 4000 series is a Premium Server Class Platform built with high internal bandwidths and processing power. The 4000 series is a multidefinition server that supports up to eight simultaneous record/play channels in HD. It uses high-performance SAS drives with a total capacity of up to 6.3TB. The 4000 series is designed to support 1080p50 and 1080p60 3Gb/s operation.

Small Tree announced ST-RAID, the newest member of its GraniteSTOR family of shared storage products. The direct attached shared storage technology is designed specifically for Final Cut Pro users looking for an economical, functional and easy to manage storage solution. It provides robust (greater than 500MB/sec), consistent performance over Ethernet networks while offering optimal cost-efficiency, and its low latency ensures there are no dropped frames. Available in 8-, 12- or 16-drive (1TB) configurations, GraniteSTOR ST-RAID enables instant availability and background initialization along with automatic insertion/removal detection and rebuild. For greater flexibility, more storage can be added easily for system expansion.

My last day at the show, Thursday, was more relaxed without back-to-back prearranged meetings, so I had a chance to wander round, seeing new products. Most impressive was the new video monitor from Barco. Although still in the design stage, the pictures were stunning. Both Barco and Sony have shown that LCDs can be used to assess picture quality without distortions added by the display. Although we may mourn the passing of the CRT, the reality is that the broadcast sector represents such a small proportion of display device that it is no longer economic to manufacture the tubes.

The Barco and Sony displays are not those you would buy in the local computer store. For a start they have a 10-bit drive, rather than the eight- or even six-bit displays in consumer gear. Without this, reproduction of blacks is poor, and certainly inadequate for grading. The other differences are LED backlights rather than cold cathode for controlled color gamuts, and 120Hz refresh to minimize the motion artefacts caused by the sample and hold of LCDs.

Apple and Avid did not have booths, but I had the opportunity for a briefing on Final Cut Server. Digital asset management has been a special interest to me since the turn of the century. Back then you needed deep pockets to set up a system, $5M was not uncommon for the software, servers and an enterprise database. Add to that the running costs, on-site database administrators, support licenses.

Apple’s offering starts at a thousand bucks. OK it’s for 10 concurrent seats, but for a local station that is just what they need to manage P2 or XDCAM media. It will be interesting to watch the takeup of this product, and whether we will see competition. It’s long been my view that file-based production demands DAM, but for many it has been unaffordable. Such products make clear the advantages of file-based production over tape. It won’t be long before young folks entering the business will understand “tape” to be data tape, and videotape will join the audio cassette as a historical curiosity.