Rascular, designers of software-based powerful, customisable control and monitoring applications for third-party, professional video technologies, has today announced a significant upgrade to its powerful RouteMaster router control application, expanding its virtual routing capabilities for NewTek’s NDI® streams alongside a brand new user interface.
RouteMaster now benefits from market-leading NDI ultra-fast switching capabilities, providing users with the ideal on-air routing solution. This ultra-fast switching makes it suitable for manual intervention and other applications where quick response is essential. It also now benefits from a far clearer and easier-to-use GUI with resizable video previews and audio metering of the current video and the chosen source. Because the NDI signals are not processed directly by RouteMaster, it can be used with a large number of NDI sources and destinations and the computing requirements are negligible.
Built on tried and tested software modules, as well as acting as a virtual router for NDI signals, RouteMaster can be used with a wide range of SDI video and audio routers from all major manufacturers. This combination is incredibly powerful, particularly with RouteMaster’s ability to work with multiple routers in a given system.
The simplest is making “stack routers”, where each router appears as one or more levels of a larger router. RouteMaster can also construct MultiRouters – where several physical routers are joined together with tielines to form a larger routing system, potentially spread over multiple sites or even continents. RouteMaster can display tieline status and automatically allocate tieline resources. Lastly, with RouteMaster’s NDI routing capabilities, users can also add a virtual NDI “layer” to an existing router, allowing them to switch IP video for monitoring simultaneously with baseband SDI video. Or, using SDI to NDI converters, construct a hybrid NDI/SDI routing system.
Roddy Pratt, Technical Director with Rascular, says, “As with sister product RouteMaster Lite, with RouteMaster we’re very pleased to be able to take a market-leading position with our ultra-fast NDI switching capabilities because of our strong commercial relationship with NewTek. This is essential in any on-air application and its importance increases in hybrid environments, for which RouteMaster is ideally suited. We are continuing to expand our Tools for NDI® and there will be more news soon in this regard.”
NDI, NewTek’s innovative Network Device Interface technology, is a royalty-free standard enabling IP video workflows across Ethernet networks. NDI is a bi-directional standard that allows video systems to identify and communicate with one another over IP, and to encode, transmit, and receive multiple streams of broadcast-quality, low latency, frame-accurate video and audio in real time.
