Sersat Argentina cambia al sistema Astra MCR para reproducción y servicios uplink de Aveco

Aveco, el especialista en soluciones de gestión mundial de contenido y automatización, ha instalado un sistema de automatización Astra MCR de cuatro canales y un CMS Astra en Sersat Argentina. La compañía ofrece servicios de reproducción y uplink satelital.

“Tenemos más de 15 años de experiencia con distintos sistemas de automatización y quedamos impresionados con el GUI de Astra, que va directo al punto y es fácil de utilizar”, aseguró el Ingeniero Javier Bonini, Gerente de Tecnología de Sersat. “El diseño alrededor de un sistema operativo en tiempo real y su reputación de fiabilidad, destacaron a Sersat de otros sistemas que observamos”.

El sistema Astra MCR de Sersat tiene cuatro playlists con una interfase de tráfico a medida, que controla la reproducción duplicada desde dos media servers Grass Valley K2. El sistema de gestión de contenido Astra CMS maneja la ingesta desde seis VTRs a un media Server K2 de ingesta, como también a los dos servers de reproducción duplicados. También maneja el espacio de disco de las tres K2 al purgar viejo contenido basado en las políticas de ciclo de vida de Sersat.

“Mientras que Sersat fue un proyecto estándar para nosotros, aún creamos un sistema a medida de sus necesidades de workflow específicas, con muchas carácterísticas que incluyen una importación personalizada de playlists y exportación as-run log”, declaró Roger Crooks, VP de Ventas y Marketing de Aveco. “Este servicio personalizado es algo que ofrecemos a todos nuestros clientes, grandes o pequeños”.

“Aveco pudo adaptar fácilmente su sistema bajo un programa de entrega ajustado, para ayudarnos a alcanzar las expectativas de demanda de un broadcaster con mucha experiencia”, explicó Francisco De Marco, Gerente General de FDM Broadcast, proveedor e integrador del sistema llave-en-mano del proyecto.

Aveco y FDM Broadcast trabajaron junto a Grass Valley y SAV para poder lanzar el sistema exitosamente.

Grass Valley Taps IT and Communications Services Industry Veteran Aengus Linehan to Lead Global Services

Grass Valley™ is pleased to announce the addition of Aengus Linehan, a veteran of the IT and communications services industry, as Senior Vice President of the company’s Global Services business unit. Linehan will be responsible for all aspects of the Grass Valley Professional Services and Customer Service business worldwide. This strategic hire was announced by Grass Valley President and CEO Alain Andreoli.

Linehan, who will be based in San Francisco, California, most recently served as Vice President of Services for the Communications and Media Solutions business unit of Hewlett-Packard. At Grass Valley he will look to grow the burgeoning Global Services business. His mission will be to build and execute a strong services plan for Grass Valley.

“We are delighted to have such an experienced executive joining us at this new and exciting stage of our history,” said Andreoli. “We welcome his vision and expertise in building a successful services business within a large media organization, and look forward to strengthening our efforts to help our customers achieve their individual goals and business models with local engineering and product support.”

Among his many duties, Linehan will seek to combine all of the highly successful Grass Valley Services capabilities around the world under a singular vision.

“What attracted me to Grass Valley was the fact that the company has a proud history and is a pioneer in the industry,” said Linehan. “When I look at the broadcast and professional video production sector, Grass Valley is an icon. It’s a company whose name is known throughout the world and I am very excited to be a part of that.”

“I plan to build out a deep services and solutions delivery capability that will allow Grass Valley to be the world’s leading provider of best-in-class video technology solutions to our customers,” Linehan continued.

With an extensive IT and Telecommunications resume, Linehan joined HP in the United States in 1998 and led worldwide business development activities for HP’s Telecom Business Unit. In 2005, he founded HP OpenCall’s Service Delivery Organization and within three years was managing HP’s CMS business in the Americas. Linehan holds a degree in Biotechnology from Dublin City University, Ireland.

It's official -- Grass Valley sold!

Grass Valley™ is pleased to announce that Francisco Partners, a leading technology-focused investment company, has completed the closing process with Technicolor and finalized the acquisition of the Grass Valley Broadcast & Professional business. As of January 1, 2011 Grass Valley began doing business as an independent company, under the trade name "Grass Valley".

Terms of the sale include 100 percent ownership of the current Grass Valley Broadcast & Professional business. This includes the camera, content repurposing, editing, master control, modular, news production, production automation, production switchers, routing, and video servers product lines including their entire product portfolios, the R&D centers and factories around the world, the Sales & Systems activities and Customer Support organization worldwide, as well as the management and administrative support functions dedicated to the business.

To help customers and technology partners to understand the specifics of the acquisition, Grass Valley has established a special website (

www.grassvalley.com/greenergrass) with the latest, most accurate and complete information. This site will allow you to view or download a number of pertinent public documents including all published press releases, FAQs, an open letter from Grass Valley management, background information on Francisco Partners, and more.

About Francisco Partners
With over $7 billion of capital under management, Francisco Partners is one of the world’s largest technology-focused private equity funds. The global firm is focused exclusively on investments in technology and technology-enabled services businesses with a strong foundation and secure market position. Francisco Partner targets investments in private companies, with transaction values ranging from $30 million to $2 billion. Since its inception, Francisco Partners has invested in excess of $4 billion of equity capital in over 50 technology companies.

For additional information about Francisco Partners, please visit www.franciscopartners.com

About Grass Valley
With a rich history serving the broadcast and professional video industries, the Grass Valley name is synonymous with innovation, leadership, and performance. With a full range of products and services supporting many of the world's most high-profile television events, Grass Valley offers the most comprehensive portfolio of flexible and cost-effective digital technologies and systems available. Customers deploying Grass Valley solutions include most of the world's leading broadcast and teleproduction facilities, independent video professionals, as well as emerging content creators and distributors providing broadband, telecommunications, and transmission services. When you’re watching news, sports, or entertainment programming, whether on a TV, the Web, or a mobile phone, you’re watching Grass Valley at work.

For information about Grass Valley products, please visit www.grassvalley.com

Nuevo Asistente de Producción Grass Valley K2 Dyno

Solución intuitiva y fácil de usar para Gestión de Contenido durante producciones en vivo.

El software Grass Valley™ K2 Dyno™ Production Assistant (PA), ofrece un conjunto de herramientas y áreas de trabajo para cada uno de los usuarios, de manera de poder facilitar la administración de eventos en vivo por parte del personal creativo.

El sistema permite revisar, modificar y transferir el contenido de múltiples sistemas controladores K2 Dyno, clientes de producción K2 y otros sistemas de almacenamiento, de una manera fácil e intuitiva.

El sistema es completamente escalable para virtualmente cualquier número de canales de Ingesta y Reproducción, Destinos para el contenido y Grupos de producción. La infraestructura fundamental para grabar, almacenar y reproducir el contenido es ofrecida por los clientes de producción K2. Es por esta razón que, aunque esta aplicación de software ofrece mejoras al ser integrada con los controladores de Reproducción “K2 Dyno” , la misma se puede utilizar para otras tareas de producción en vivo, en caso que los controladores de reproducción no estén presentes.

Ventajas del Asistente de Producción K2 Dyno

· Fácil de usar, ofrece interfaces modernas con operaciones estándar, usando teclado y “mouse”, para el equipo de creación.

· Gestión de Contenido, permite ingresar información de metadatos de manera “off-line” por adelantado, para crear campos como nombres y tipos de acción relevante del evento.

· Interoperabilidad de archivos, realiza transferencias de archivos en el “background”, mientras se realizan las operaciones de producción.

· Integración con Sistemas de Edición: Sistemas de edición como el Grass Valley EDIUS, Apple Final Cut Pro y Avid Media Composer pueden ser interconectados con los clientes K2 y transferir los archivos.

· Operación de multicanal

Más informaciones en http://www.grassvalley.com/products/k2_dyno_pa

Grass Valley Congratulates MLB Network on Winning Four Sports Emmy® Awards For Its Inaugural Year

MLB Network, having completed its first full year in operation, has been honored with four Sports Emmy® awards for its inaugural year, including its signature daily studio show “MLB Tonight.” Three of the awards presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) honor MLB Network’s technical acumen in building one of the largest and most complex file-based video production centers in the country, featuring networked editing environment and a content management and repurposing architecture supported by Grass Valley™ technologies.

“MLB Tonight” was honored in the following categories: Outstanding Technical Team Studio; Outstanding Graphic Design; and Outstanding Studio Show – Daily. MLB Network’s Bob Costas won his 20th Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Personality- Studio Host for his work with both MLB Network and NBC Sports.

MLB Network’s facility in Secaucus, New Jersey features a full complement of Grass Valley technology, including a fully networked Grass Valley Storage Area Network (SAN) with dozens of Grass Valley Aurora™ Edit HD editing and other Aurora products working seamlessly alongside Final Cut Pro edit systems.

In the upcoming season, MLB Network editors will take advantage of the latest features of the Grass Valley Aurora 7.0 software suite, which allows them to digitize media within the Aurora Ingest application, work on a project in Aurora Edit, and then output that finished news segment to Aurora Playout. As they do all this, the associated metadata travels along with the media and can be accessed for a variety of tasks (e.g., clip management on a server) that streamline the production process.

“We are grateful to Grass Valley for their assistance in establishing our file-based video production system that was honored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences,” said Tab Butler, Director of Media Management at MLB Network.

“We sincerely compliment MLB Network and the people involved in designing and implementing a true state-of-the-art facility that the rest of the industry has looked at closely and learned from,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “As a technology supplier, we are proud to be a part of this iconic facility and to have helped MLB Network archive its goals of sharing and creating content in a timely fashion that is completely seamless to the production staff. The Emmy Awards are well deserved.”

Grass Valley’s MediaFrame SDK enables tight integration with MLB Network’s proprietary asset management system, allowing journalists, producers and editors to quickly and accurately locate, retrieve and view video clips from its vast archive on any desktop in the building.

MediaFrame features a multi-layered software architecture that leverages metadata in unique ways that quickly (in real time) and intuitively facilitate taking raw materials and turning them into finished segments for direct airing. It makes users more productive by benefiting all of the applications that comprise the Aurora platform—including Aurora Edit, Aurora Ingest, Aurora Playout, and Aurora Browse.

Grass Valley Kayenne Serves as the Centerpiece of Trinity

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the largest religious network in the world (based in Los Angeles, Calf.), has installed a Grass Valley™ Kayenne™ Video Production Center, as the centerpiece of a completely rebuilt high-definition production studio in Nashville, Tenn. that went live in February.

The new Nashville studio—one of eight major production centers that TBN maintains throughout the country—now serves as a model for the network’s continuing migration to HD at its other production facilities.

To date, the network’s facilities in Costa Mesa, Calif. Irving, Texas, and New York City all have Grass Valley Kalypso™ HD switchers installed. Going forward, all new and upgraded TBN studios will feature Kayenne switchers, including the network’s new Nashville facility as well as its new Orlando site, which is scheduled for completion in December 2010.

“We were in the process of completing our fourth HD installation [Nashville] and were previously using Grass Valley Kalypso HD switchers because we like the way they operate, but we waited to finish Nashville until we received our new Kayenne,” said Russell Hall, General Manager of the TBN Nashville facility. “We liked the Kayenne so much that it will now be the switcher of choice for all of our facilities going forward. This includes Los Angeles and Miami, where we will deploy Kayenne switchers in 2011/2012.”

TBN Nashville uses the Kayenne for a number of different types of programming, including live concerts and events, as well as sitcoms, award shows, and talk shows. In Nashville, the shows are produced in the network’s 1,500-seat theater, as well as a 100x100 box studio. The Kayenne is being used to handle sources for both rooms–often times simultaneously.

At TBN Nashville, the HD upgrade (from analog equipment) started in May of 2009 and finished in February of this year. The facility is now completely HD-compatible, which includes a 4 M/E Kayenne, and also includes the addition of a new Grass Valley Trinix™ NXT 256x256 router.

“The Kayenne continues to impress customers and is following in the historic footsteps of our other notable Grass Valley switchers that have become proven workhorses in a variety of applications,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “TBN serves a large community across the country that requires the best production values possible to convey their message. The Kayenne gives them that and a whole lot more.”

“Some of our technical directors come from high-end sports and entertainment backgrounds and what they enjoy about the Kayenne is that they now have the ultimate platform in terms of flexibility to do any type of production, any way that they want,” continues Hall. “There’s not a single limitation that we have come across. Our crews can't say enough good things about it. I have personally been using video production switchers for many years [since 1986]. I have done extensive work on every major switcher ever manufactured and Kayenne is the best switcher in the history of the broadcast industry.”

In the past month TBN Nashville has enhanced its Kayenne with an optional ClipStore, which is based on Grass Valley’s proven and widely used K2 Summit™ and K2 Solo™ video servers and works in tandem with the Kayenne’s current internal ImageStore. Once installed, the ClipStore will allow TBN operators to store and recall still images and video clips from within the Kayenne’s ImageStore menu panel and E-MEM/Cue systems.

The 4-channel, 2 RU ClipStore integrated server system allows Kayenne users to access a huge library of SD or HD video for animations, replays, or any other type of video. The existing six optional ImageStore Channels (for stills) are not tied up when using the new K2-based ClipStore system for video. The ability to create folders and clip names has also been incorporated within the ImageStore menu to make it easier to manage the large amount of content now available.

Road Show 2010 Megaservice en Argentina