Leader Europe has provided two LV7300 rasterizing waveform monitors to the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden. They were chosen as part of an extensive UHD/HDR upgrade carried out to the facilities used to relay stage performances for live viewing by cinema audiences in Europe and for distribution to other venues around the world.

"We needed instruments that would operate reliably in our current HD-SDR production environment and in the 4K-HDR standard to which we aspire," comments ROH Media broadcast engineer and production mixer Mark Thackeray. "The Royal Opera House in London has been broadcasting live to cinemas in 5.1 surround sound for 10 years. In any one season we transmit 12 or more productions."

"Our first 4K-HDR project was a documentary in 2017 for NHK. Leader lent us an LV5490 portable waveform monitor for that production as we needed the ability to capture, monitor and deliver Rec. 2020 wide color gamut video. The instrument functioned well both as an engineering reference and with its intuitive CINEZONE and CINELITE toolsets which are particularly useful during live production.

"For permanent installation, we decided on two LV7300 rasterizers which provide a full set of 12G/3G/HD/SD-SDI measurement facilities that our production staff can view on a larger display screen. The instruments are useful both to ensure accurate color matching of camera channels and for ensuring that we are delivering the best possible signal quality right through the production chain."

The Company's In-Depth Knowledge of Observer and Forward-Looking Approach to Product Development Allow Broadcasters to Move Forward With Confidence

Visit Digital Nirvana at the 2020 NAB Show

FREMONT, Calif. — Feb. 12, 2020 — Digital Nirvana, a provider of leading-edge media-monitoring and metadata generation services, is leveraging its uniquely robust MonitorIQ broadcast monitoring and compliance logging platform and the company's wealth of solution-specific expertise to enable a seamless migration path for users of the Volicon Observer broadcast monitoring and compliance product. The Volicon system will reach its end-of-support date this coming June.

"I and many of my colleagues at Digital Nirvana contributed to development and refinement of the Observer feature sets that broadcasters know so well today," said Keith DesRosiers, director of sales solutions at Digital Nirvana. "We know the Observer product inside and out, and we've built on that knowledge and experience to design and deliver new forward-looking solutions with which broadcasters can gain greater insight into aired content — and derive greater value from that content. MonitorIQ goes beyond regulatory and compliance requirements, giving broadcasters access to valuable next-generation tools for content processing and analysis."

LAS VEGAS, FEBRUARY 20, 2020 – Studio Technologies introduces its new StudioComm Dante Audio-over-IP-enabled multichannel monitoring system, the Model 792 Central Controller and the Model 793 Control Console, at NAB 2020 (Booth C7049). The new system combines a robust rack-mounted main electronics unit with a desktop user control surface. The “fully-pro” signal path uses programmable logic to support both digital and analog audio. An extensive set of configuration features allow the system to support next-gen immersive formats including 5.1.4, 7.1.4, and 10.2.

Ikegami representatives head to the Dubai World Trade Centre in March for CABSAT 2020, the largest broadcast media show in the Middle East region. The exhibition together with its supporting conference and workshop will be held from March 31st through April 2nd. Highlights of the Ikegami exhibit on stand C4-20 will be the UHL-43 compact HDR camera which was shown in prototype at CABSAT 2019 and is now fully deliverable, the UHK-430 system camera with IP interface and the HQLM-3125X master grade video monitor.

The Ikegami UHL-43 is a compact HDR camera designed for applications such as robotic studios, outside broadcasting of live events, parliamentary television and point-of-view image capture.

Ikegami's UHK-430 is a 4K-native studio camera system with simultaneous HDR/SDR processing. Its three 2/3 inch CMOS sensors provide full 3840 x 2160 UHD resolution plus the depth of field needed for studio and outdoor production. The camera is equipped with a B4 bayonet mount compatible with 2/3 inch UHD and HD lenses. An optional SE-U430 expander accommodates large studio or OB lenses.

Ikegami's recently introduced HQLM-3125X is a 31 inch 4K-UHD master-grade monitor with 4,096 × 2,160 pixel 10-bit resolution and high brightness (1,000 candela per square metre).

Sound Designer Matt McCamley has installed a 5.1 surround sound system based on PMC result6 compact nearfield monitors at Focus Audio, his studio in Brisbane, Australia.

“They definitely sound like PMC's, and not a PMC 'Light' series, that’s for sure,” he says. “A lot of manufacturers claim their monitors are being honest and translate to the real world, but there aren't too many around that can back-up that claim. PMC can.”

McCamley specialises in Sound Design for the computer games industry, working for both AAA and Independent publishers. After 10 years in the UK where he was an in-house Senior Sound Designer at Rocksteady Studios (London), Ninja Theory (Cambridge) and Creative Assembly (Horsham), McCamley returned to Australia and set up Focus Audio, a games audio outsourcing company. Recent projects include sound design for Total War: 3 Kingdoms and the upcoming Troy. He has also worked on franchises such as Devil May Cry, Alien and Batman, as well as multiple Total Wars and new IP's.

GB Labs, innovators of powerful and intelligent media storage solutions for the media and entertainment industries, today confirmed that the specialist video production company, Kingdom Creative Studios, has installed GB Labs’ FastNAS F-16 Nitro storage system.

Kingdom Creative founder and Managing Director, Simon Harrison, said, “Our talented in-house team works closely with major brands¬ - primarily in automotive but rapidly expanding into new markets - to deliver powerful video content tailored to engage audiences on every platform, from television to social media.

“However, our expansion, coupled with the advent of 4K, multi-cam shoots and the increasing demand for rapid turnaround, meant that we reached the practical limits of what our existing storage system could do. We had to find a better way to manage and operate storage.”

For the majority of its existence, Kingdom Creative had relied on what many still rely on today, i.e., storing video content on individual drives, backing them up, and walking them up and down corridors or transferring them via couriers.

“As we began taking on larger and more complicated projects,” said Kingdom Creative Head of Creative Technology Ben Treston, “especially when collaboration between editors became important, it turned out that the old methods were no longer viable. Today, we have multiple editors working on many pieces of content from the same project. You can’t share individual hard drives and meet today’s expectations for speed and reliability in those types of scenarios.”

The FastNAS F-16 Nitro system meets those objectives for speed, reliability and value in shared storage. Unlike other NAS products on the market, FastNAS is purpose built to sustain heavy workloads and provide stable and reliable performance, based on best of breed technology exclusively developed in-house, and is comprised of a high-performance unit with unique hybrid disk technology, powered by GB Labs’ proprietary CORE.3 OS.

GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland said, “Kingdom Creative emerged from a motorsport world built for speed, and that’s what modern shared storage has been engineered to deal with. FastNAS F-16 Nitro easily accommodates the need for speed – and safety – when dealing with fast turnarounds and sharp bends.”

mediaClass, a globally active provider of OTT TV everywhere solutions, has announced its own developed AI-based recommendation Engine.

”We have been testing and measuring the success rate of the engine for some time," says mediaClass CTO Stilian Tchlakov. "For this release we have settled on two operator-selectable modes, both of which offer excellent results."

"Without giving too much away technically, mode one is based on AI analysis of personal preferences and searches; mode two is based on studying and machine learning the watching-behaviour of hundreds of thousands of anonymous subscribers” adds mediaClass Head of Research and Development Youri Kalinov. "The mediaClass AI Recommendation Engine uses state of the art technology from Liberate AI to predict and deliver viewer-specific television content recommendations. This is a step change from what has been possible in the past."

“Judging from the measurement results I have seen, the Liberate AI machine learning technology certainly gives us a significant edge," details mediaClass EVP Manelli Hosseini. "We will be providing the engine as an integral part all mediaClass deployments. We now have to decide whether to market the recommendation engine as a standalone package to offer its advantages for non-mediaClass deployments.”

Sony has launched a new set of high-grade picture monitors from its TRIMASTER range at this year’s BSC Expo in London. 

The PVM-X2400 (24’’) and the PVM-X1800 (18.4’’) monitors provide high picture quality and accurate colour reproduction thanks to specified and dedicated panels from Sony, which offer ultra-high definition with a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels and an impressive brightness of all-white luminance of 1000 cd/m2.

Following recent investment in Leader LV7600 UHD HDR rasterizers for its UHD and HDR capable grading and finishing areas, dock10 has purchased a Leader LV5600 SDI/IP waveform monitor as part of ongoing technical development of the production resources supporting MediaCity UK in Salford. The LV5600 was supplied by Leader Europe UK channel partner Jigsaw24. It will be integrated into dock10's newly completed UHD HDR live production system, checking incoming camera feeds from multiple studio cameras to ensure uniform alignment and color matching.

"Ultra high definition and high dynamic range each have an important role to play in the television industry as it progresses to meet rising viewer expectations," comments John O’Shaughnessy, Head of Technology Operations at dock10. "The greater quality made possible by originating content in higher resolution and wider illumination span opens up many new opportunities for content creators. It also increases the long-term value of their productions. Leader's LV5600 incorporates the tools our operators and technicians need to ensure the full impact of UHD and HDR is carried from the point of capture in the studio front end right through to each viewer's display screen."

Actus Digital, a leading provider of compliance and intelligent media monitoring solutions, today announced that it has appointed Jay Gedanken as vice president of business development in the U.S. With over 35 years' experience in broadcast technology sales, technical support, marketing, and project management, Gedanken will play a critical role in increasing Actus Digital's footprint in the United States market, developing new sales channels, and driving revenue growth.

"Business development opportunities are booming in the U.S., with Actus Digital poised to fill the void left by former U.S. industry leader Volicon and its end-of-life products while also meeting the growing customer demand for compliance solutions featuring content repurposing and AI," said Sima Levy, CEO, Actus Digital. "We continue to increase the scale of our U.S. office as a result of growing sales and activities, and hiring Jay will keep us on track. Leveraging his experience in broadcast sales, Actus Digital will continue to build on its 15-plus years of providing superior compliance and media monitoring solutions."