Grass Valley continues to support collaboration across the media production chain to strengthen deliverables for customers by welcoming several new members to the Grass Valley Technology Alliance (GVTA). Launched in April 2019, the certification program delivers key benefits to customers, such as improved purchasing confidence and access to a wide range of systems and solutions that are interoperable with Grass Valley platforms and workflow components. EcoDigital, Haivision, Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) and Vitec Group’s Vinten and Autoscript join the five existing companies already part of the GVTA.

Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (RTP) has standardized on Grass Valley cameras, deploying 49 LDX 82 Elite camera systems, with XDR licenses, across its studios and Outside Broadcast (OB) fleet. The upgrade to its camera chains provides HD and high dynamic range (HDR) support across RTP’s live events and studio productions and ensures future-proof acquisition capability, thanks to Grass Valley’s robust upgrade path. The sale was managed by Grass Valley’s Portuguese channel partner Ibertelco.

With the new cameras in place, the RTP production team can seamlessly switch between resolutions (1080i, 720p and 1080PsF), while the PowerCurves feature handles shoots in even the most challenging conditions. Any lighting issues are easily addressed using LDX 82 Elite’s built-in Color Protect function.

At its GV LIVE Presents – Innovate 2020 event on April 23, Grass Valley launched its new cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) Agile Media Processing Platform (GV AMPP). This game-changing solution unlocks the power of elastic compute for live sports, news, and playout workflows, helping customers easily transition to the future-ready public, data center or hybrid infrastructures.

The first application available for the platform, AMPP Master Control, has been on air with Blizzard since the opening of the Overwatch League 2020 season in early February. In response to the COVID-19 crisis and building off this solution set, AMPP has been an essential system enabling the esports leader to keep its Overwatch League^TM and Call of Duty^® League^TM matches live since March 28, enabling truly distributed remote production with all operators and talent working from their homes.

“Our leagues rely on cloud infrastructure to produce live, multi-language broadcasts for global audiences,” said Pete Emminger, vice president of global broadcast at Blizzard Entertainment. “As a launch customer for Grass Valley, the Overwatch League has been using AMPP since the start of the 2020 season. AMPP provides an incredible value as it furthers our cloud capability and empowers our remote broadcast setup, allowing us to remain flexible even in the face of a global health pandemic.”

Grass Valley introduces LiveTouch 1300, the latest member of its award-winning live highlights and replay production system. The new solution brings enhanced flexibility to 4K UHD production allowing users to capture video directly from IP sources, and delivers expanded collaborative workflow capability making it ideal for mobile production.

Designed for mobile, outside broadcast (OB) productions and sports venues, the rugged system is built for life on the road. The new HTML5 LiveTouch Dashboard makes system monitoring, control, start up and basic configuration straightforward and quick in the on-and-off environment of an OB truck.

Chris Merrill, Grass Valley’s director of product marketing, commented: "The demand for captivating, stunning quality content is at an all-time high. We developed LiveTouch 1300 to help our customers efficiently create immersive 4K UHD and HDR replays in any production scenario. Now more than ever it is crucial to allow broadcasters and content owners greater freedom to cover live events regardless of their location. LiveTouch 1300 makes distributed production and collaborative workflows easy and fast."

Grass Valley reinforces its leadership in driving the evolution of live production with the launch of its new GV K-Frame XP video production engine. Designed to make higher resolution content creation easier, the new compact switcher packs a powerful punch with unmatched functionality across multiformat environments and high signal density, even with the increased bandwidth requirements of 4K UHD. Featuring true single stream, full raster, 4K processing at 2160p, the K-Frame XP eliminates the need for compromise in 4K UHD productions; there’s no reduction in I/O count in 4K UHD, no reduction in M/Es, keyers or DPMS in 4K UHD, and no change in operator workflow in 4K UHD.

Marco Lopez, Grass Valley’s senior vice president of live production, commented: “With the drive to deliver richer storytelling, we’re seeing customers really ramp up the volume of 4K UHD content being produced. This demand for increased production bandwidth has created workarounds that in the past have ultimately slowed down and put limits on the workflow. Grass Valley has built a hugely powerful hardware platform that can take on the ultra-fast pace of live content production – particularly sports – and ease the constraints of handling any resolution, even 4K UHD.”

Grass Valley continues to drive the evolution of live production with the launch of the LDX 100 camera platform. This latest addition to the company’s camera portfolio is a high-speed, native UHD camera that takes a revolutionary approach to camera design. Built from the ground up with native IP connectivity, the camera delivers signals directly into the network, conveniently enabling access to them wherever they are needed – even, for example, as return feed monitoring from another camera position. The LDX 100 unlocks greater creativity and flexibility for content creators, freeing them from the physical constraints of traditional live production environments.

Marco Lopez, Grass Valley’s senior vice president of live production commented: “Today, live production workflows – particularly in sports – need to be smarter and more flexible than ever, removing barriers to creativity and collaboration. Our customers also tell us they want to harness the best creative and on-screen talent, wherever in the world they might be. We’ve driven the transition to remote production, which is a vital step in this direction, but now the industry is ready for the next step-change. Grass Valley now leads the way with opening up true distributed production; we’re putting the full power of IP at our customers’ fingertips – right from the camera removing the need for base stations. The LDX 100 brings together Grass Valley’s deep knowledge of IP and long heritage in live production to create a future-ready camera solution that opens up new possibilities in production workflows.”

All Mobile Video (AMV) has chosen Grass Valley’s end-to-end, open standards-based IP workflows and infrastructure for its latest outside broadcast (OB) truck, ECLIPSE. Grass Valley’s market-leading solutions – from cameras to switchers and shading to orchestration – give AMV the capability to handle everything from HD to 4K UHD and HDR, plus the ability to scale up to 8K when needed.

The future-ready unit will support a range of live productions, including major award and red carpet events, the “Live from Lincoln Center” performing arts series, and the Times Square Ball Drop on New Year’s Eve. AMV’s ECLIPSE will be ready to roll later this spring.

The new AMV IP unit comes fully loaded with Grass Valley’s revolutionary new LDX 100 IP camera platform, delivering 3x high-speed UHD capture, with the award-winning Creative Grading solution bringing unparalleled creative control to camera shaders. Simplifying the IP workflow is the GV Orbit dynamic system orchestrator; using the interface, operators can easily configure and change systems on the fly. The IP workflow is supported by an IP fabric built with Nexus 9000 Series Switches from Cisco Systems.

“Cisco’s Nexus 9K-based IP Fabric for Media supports the latest SMPTE 2110 suite of standards and is ideally suited to build a scalable and agile switching fabric for the most challenging media production needs,” said Sunil Gudurvalmiki, Product Marketing Director Data Center Switching, Cisco. “We are excited to partner with Grass Valley and World Wide Technology to provide the best path to market”.

“World Wide Technology is an industry leading systems integrator in the media space and is Cisco’s first certified partner in the IP Fabric for Media (IPFM) solution,” said Gene Arantowicz, Systems Engineering Manager at WWT. “WWT partners closely with Grass Valley in their broadcast solution by providing global design, supply chain, integration and deployment services.”

Grass Valley is launching GV STRATUS One Pro, an all-in-one production suite that allows content creators to be faster and more efficient with a small- footprint solution. The new platform is one of two new additions to the GV STRATUS One product family, alongside the new GV STRATUS One Express. Redefining the potential of your production workflow, GV STRATUS One allows truly collaborative working across every aspect of the media workflow. Production teams can now harness more storage, processing power and rendering abilities to deliver compelling content to multiple linear and digital delivery platforms with a single click. The Pro and Express options also include groups of licenses with the users’ choice of editor whether it be Grass Valley’s EDIUS software included or Adobe Premiere connect licenses.

Grass Valley demonstrates its commitment to leading the industry toward a cloud-based future with a series of product introductions and new, soon-to-be-released strategic initiatives that promise to shift the paradigm in media workflow flexibility, scalability and performance.

During this challenging time for the world and our heavily impacted industry, Grass Valley leverages its history of stability and reliability to deliver solutions that help content creators and media organizations manage through the current crisis while also ensuring they’re prepared for the future with tools that help them deal with the unprecedented demand for more content by enabling them to unleash the creativity of their teams.

For Live Production, Grass Valley launches the LDX 100 camera platform, a high-speed, native UHD camera built specifically for the rigors of IP-connected workflows, such as Remote/At-Home Production because it connects directly into the contribution network – eliminating the need for an external control unit. LDX 100 maximizes rich storytelling abilities and is ergonomically designed to provide additional benefits for operators.

Complementing the new camera platform is the launch of the company’s newest production switcher engine, K-Frame XP. Featuring true single-stream, full raster processing at 2160p, the K-Frame XP takes the complexity out of 4K UHD workflows, removing the processing power barriers that have existed that forced compromises in I/O count and even in the on-air look. Popular Grass Valley switcher control surfaces Kayenne, Karrera, GV Korona and KSP are compatible with K-Frame XP, allowing customers to leverage their existing investments.

Marco Lopez, Grass Valley’s senior vice president of live production, commented, “Our customers have seen big increases in demand for 4K UHD content and many of them are using IP workflows to support this growing demand. These two new platforms deliver on the Grass Valley promise to enable storytellers to unleash their creativity while increasing their workflow efficiency.”

Globo has selected Grass Valley’s IP infrastructure solutions for its new facility in Rio de Janeiro. The deployment gives the broadcaster access to faster configuration, greater operational efficiencies and centralized network management across the three studios in the new MG4 complex. Globo also benefits from increased capacity to produce more drama and entertainment content, such as mini-series and telenovelas, for its platforms.

The new studio infrastructure is built around Grass Valley’s IPEDGE-SRV-D IP routing controller, IQUCP25 user-configurable, multichannel, video-over-IP transceiver, IP Multiviewers, Orbit dynamic system orchestrator and Luna configurable control panels. The end-to-end IP solution is based on the ST-2110 standard leveraging its full interoperability and also includes Cisco COTS Switches and Tektronix Master Sync Generators. The system was deployed and will be fully supported by Grass Valley. The IP approach gives Globo greater flexibility and scalability, allowing the broadcaster to quickly and cost-efficiently spin-up new services and resources when needed.