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Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, has reached a new product milestone, selling more than 1,000 NVISION 8500 Enterprise Routers to broadcasters, studios, mobile production and playout facilities globally.

Often referred to as a “hybrid technology routing platform,” the NVISION router was designed with an eye toward the future and is easily adapted to support increased levels of processing, bandwidth and even connectivity. When the series originally launched, it was a family of one, designed and shipped as the NV8576 that supported SDI over coax and fiber as well as Async AES. Since then, the series has expanded to include four additional frames: the NV8144, the NV8280, the NV8576-Plus and the NV8140.

By creating a family of routers, Grass Valley made more components interchangeable between frames and as a result, the company experienced a significant response from the market. With the growth of the family, the NVISION series became ideal for customers looking to expand into bigger frames without having to replace all of their I/O or crosspoint cards. The series also gives customers the ability to have multi-router systems and only one set of spares.

Customers around the world have come to rely on NVISION routers to keep their operations running at peak performance. A number of major international networks, as well as IMG Studios in the U.K., LeSEA Broadcasting Network and the MLB Network in the U.S., are just a few examples of operations utilizing the power of NVISION routers.

In addition to adding new frames, Grass Valley has also enhanced a number of NVISION features since inception. These include the launch of patented integrated video and audio processing, as well as the award-winning NAB 2014 IP Gateway card. This ensures that today’s investments remain Future Ready, as customers can bridge the gap between SDI and IP infrastructures, preserving their CAPEX investment in SDI and allowing them to transition to IP at their own pace.

By listening to the needs of the customer, Grass Valley has developed innovations that have made the NV8500 series one of the most successful routing technology platforms available on the market today. The advanced level of signal performance and system redundancies is critical for broadcasters and playout alike. Redundant crosspoints, power supplies and control cards help keep the routing system on air at all times. Efficient cooling and unique power distribution designs have increased the lifetime and reliability of the router, ensuring it is working 24/7/365.

As productions become more complex, the hybrid routing with patented integrated audio processing is key to dramatically reducing space, weight and power for studios and mobile production. Integration of disembedding/embedding, frame synchronization, MADI and multiviewer connectivity into the routing chassis means that customers can achieve even greater savings. This reduces both CAPEX and OPEX, all while simplifying signal work and signal flow.

“Since its inception as a coax SDI router, we’ve been able to add fiber connectivity, audio and video processing, and even IP connectivity to the NVISION platform,” said Tim Walker, sr. product manager, NVISION Routing. “This is a true testament to the original architectural design, and we aren’t done—Grass Valley will continue to innovate and add functionality to this field-proven, industry-respected and Future Ready hybrid technology routing platform. This is an exciting milestone for Grass Valley and we look forward to many more.”

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has elevated 15 industry leaders to the status of SMPTE Fellow. This honor is conferred on individuals who have, through their proficiency and contributions to the industries, attained an outstanding rank among members of the Society.

New SMPTE Fellows will be elevated on Wednesday, Oct. 28, during the Fellows Luncheon, held in conjunction with the SMPTE 2015 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition (SMPTE 2015) at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles. Here's the lineup of SMPTE 2015 Fellows:

Annie Chang, Vice President of Post-Production Technology at The Walt Disney Studios
Annie Chang oversees the research and implementation of new technology within Disney’s feature post-production and mastering pipelines through new file-based workflows and standards efforts. She is the chair of the SMPTE Interoperable Master Format (IMF) Working Group and represents Disney in the UHD Alliance as a board director. Prior to Disney, Chang spent six years at THX Ltd. as the senior engineer for the Digital Mastering Program and three years in DVD authoring and compression. She holds a Bachelor of Science in engineering technology from Texas A&M University.

Paul R. Chapman, Senior Vice President of Technology at FotoKem
Paul Chapman has worked in the video and post-production industries in Los Angeles for more than 25 years, having come from the U.K. after a career in software engineering. Early in his career, he was very active in the telecine community, working for both manufacturers and users such as Rank Cintel, Unimedia and Complete Post, and Unitel Video. In 1996, Chapman joined FotoKem, holding a variety of engineering leadership positions and, in his current role, takes responsibility for evaluating, recommending, and implementing all aspects of digital technology companywide. He is a past chair of the SMPTE Hollywood Section and a current SMPTE Hollywood Region Governor.

Peter Fasciano, Executive Director at Franklin TV and WFPR-FM
Peter Fasciano designed, built, and managed television stations and teleproduction studios throughout the 1970s and in the 1980s founded a successful film and video production company. He then worked with Bill Warner to launch Avid in 1987 and design the interface for Avid’s first product, the Media Composer nonlinear editor. As vice president and corporate fellow for Avid Technology’s Advance Product Development Group, he designed, developed, and prototyped AirPlay, the first play-to-air, fully automated video server; EditCam, the first tapeless video camcorder; Digidesign’s AudioVision; and the Avid Unity enterprise media server system. He holds more than 20 patents, and his design research defined new product categories that have been honored with seven Emmy® Awards and two Oscars®.

Simon Fell, Director of Technology and Innovation at European Broadcasting Union 
Simon Fell leads the team spearheading developments in media technologies at the EBU. He has four decades of experience, formerly with ITV as director of future technologies. Previously, he helped establish Carlton Television, where he held several executive positions and participated in the digital broadcasting launch. Fell has chaired the Technical Council at the U.K.’s Digital Television Group (DTG) and was chairman of the HD Forum. Additional roles include serving as director of engineering for rushes and chief engineer of 625, and establishing Channel Four, where he assisted in the introduction of Super 16 film. Fell’s early career included periods with Rank Cintel in the U.S. and with YTV in Leeds, U.K.

William T. Hayes, Director of Engineering and Technology at Iowa Public Television
William T. Hayes has worked in radio and television broadcasting since 1973, garnering extensive experience in planning, designing, and constructing television stations. He currently is responsible for the planning and development of all technology projects at Iowa Public Television, and he is active in future broadcast planning nationally and internationally, serving on a number of committees developing standards for emerging technologies such as mobile/hybrid television and the next generation of terrestrial digital television. Hayes is the SMPTE Central Region Governor and, as a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), serves as the president of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society (BTS). He is also a member of the Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE), which named him Educator of the Year in 2007 and the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE).

Larry J. Hornbeck, TI Fellow Emeritus at Texas Instruments
Solid-state physicist, Larry J. Hornbeck has spent most of his 40-year research-and-development career at Texas Instruments developing microdisplays, first in TI’s Central Research Laboratories and later in DLP Products. Following a decade of research on analog technologies that fell short of expectations, he invented the digital micromirror device (DMD), a chip technology (the DLP chip) that provides for the high-speed, digital manipulation of light and enables products including the DLP Cinema projectors popular today. Hornbeck holds 38 U.S. patents, and his numerous awards and honors include a 2014 Academy Award of Merit (Oscar® statuette), induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the SMPTE 2002 David Sarnoff Medal Award, and a 1998 Emmy® Engineering Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and a Fellow of the IEEE and SPIE.

Jim Houston, Principal at Starwatcher Digital
Jim Houston currently consults on digital production and new technologies for motion pictures and television. Earlier, while vice president of technology and engineering for Sony Pictures, he designed and built the Colorworks 4K post-production facility. For 30 years, he has developed or managed digital production facilities for animation, visual effects (VFX), restoration, and post-production for Disney, Sony, and several post-production companies. He has received two Academy Scientific and Engineering Awards and led two projects winning 2012 Engineering Emmys. He is a member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Technology Committee, serves as cochairman of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) Project Committee, and is active in standards development for digital cinema, ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV), metadata, and future display systems.

Toshiaki Kojima, Senior Standard Manager at Sony Corporation
Toshiaki Kojima has worked in both the audio/video (AV) and information technology (IT) industry sectors over the past 33 years. For the first 20 years of his career, Kojima was involved mainly in the design of professional video tape recorders (VTRs), from 1-inch to the e-VTR, and he received a 2004 Sports Emmy® recognizing the role of the e-VTR in NBC’s Athens 2004 Olympics coverage. He since has moved into research and development with the aim of replacing dedicated professional AV interfaces with those of general Internet protocol (IP). Kojima is an active participant in network-related industry and standardization bodies including Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS), Video Services Forum (VSF), SMPTE, and the Joint Task Force on Professional Networked Streamed Media (JT-NM). He holds 20 Japanese and international patents and is an MIT Fellow.

Sara J. Kudrle, Product Marketing Manager at Grass Valley, a Belden Brand
Sara Kudrle began her career as a broadcast industry engineer at Tektronix, where she worked in the VideoTele.com business, and then joined the TV transmitter group at Continental Electronics, which later became Axcera, working on exciter control software and single-frequency networks (SFNs). From there she moved on to Miranda/NVISION, where she handled several projects within the router control group, and, most recently, joined Grass Valley. She has authored papers for NAB, PBS, and SMPTE conferences and has been published in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal and Broadcast Engineering, earning the SMPTE 2012 Journal Award for “Fingerprinting for Solving A/V Synchronization Issues Within Broadcast Environments.” She holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science with a minor in mathematics from California State University, Chico. Kudrle is a former SMPTE secretary/treasurer for Sacramento and is the current SMPTE Western Region Governor. She is also a member of IEEE.

Karl Joseph Kuhn, Senior Video Applications Engineer at Tektronix
Karl Joseph Kuhn is senior video systems application engineer with Tektronix, supporting test and measurement solutions for digital audio and video, compression, IP, file-based, and radio frequency (RF). He has been at Tektronix for 15 years and is deeply involved in presenting at industry events and providing technology training for his customers. Kuhn earlier was the lead video test engineer for IBM’s Digital Video Development Laboratory. He holds three U.S. patents and one Japanese patent that cover in-service testing of digital broadcast video. Kuhn served on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) Technical and Engineering Emmy Committee from 2006 to 2010 and is past chairman of the SMPTE Washington, D.C., Section and past SMPTE Eastern Region Governor. He currently serves as SMPTE North American membership director.

Kenneth Michel, Vice President of Content Systems Engineering at Disney/ABC (retired)
Kenneth Michel spent 34 years at Disney/ABC in the broadcast operations and engineering division of the ABC TV network, serving as the vice president of engineering for 17 of those years. With more than 25 years in the ABC engineering lab, he helped to develop many products used in the TV industry today. Michel was instrumental in transitioning the industry to HDTV and in facilitating the adoption of progressive scan. He has been awarded five U.S. patents (two pending) and has received nine Disney Inventor Awards, two technical Emmy Awards for his work on the 1984 Olympics and the 1989 World Series, and a Primetime Emmy Award. He chaired the IEEE committee that revised the IEEE 208-1960 standard on how to measure camera resolution.

Delbert R. Parks III, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Sinclair Television Group, Inc.
Delbert R. Parks III has been with Sinclair Television Group since 1972, moving up through the ranks since he began in the engineering department of Sinclair’s flagship station, WBFF-TV in Baltimore. In his current executive position, Parks handles planning, organizing, and implementing of operational and engineering policies and strategies as they relate to television operations, Internet activity, information management systems, and infrastructure. He is a member of the SBE and serves on the board of directors of the Baltimore Area Council, Boy Scouts of America. He is a retired Army lieutenant colonel who held various commands during his 26-year reserve career.

Michael Strein, Director of Technology and Workflow at ABC-TV
Over the past 25 years, Michael Strein has been at the forefront of virtually every technical advancement that the ABC network has made, from the analog-to-digital conversion, to the HDTV transition to the launch of the WATCH ABC streaming platform. Strein has earned 14 Disney Inventor Awards that have resulted in seven patents, with several others still in process. He has served on the SMPTE New York Section board of managers as television program chair since 1997, earning the SMPTE Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society award in 2010. He maintains an extensive involvement in the vendor and standards communities.

Giles Wilson, Head of TV Compression Business at Ericsson
As head of Ericsson’s TV compression business, Giles Wilson oversees the strategy, vision, and development of the company’s industry-leading compression technology portfolio to ensure that it meets the content acquisition, exchange, and delivery requirements of broadcasters and operators around the world. He has played a pioneering role in the company’s 20-year heritage of creating next-generation compression solutions and has been instrumental in developing the technology architectures and solutions for many of today’s leading TV experiences, including the world’s first MPEG-4 AVC HD encoder, which was recognized with an Emmy Award for its technical innovation. Earlier executive roles include the head of TV technology at Ericsson, as well as chief architect and, subsequently, senior vice president of technology at Tandberg Television.

Peter A. Wilson, Founder and Managing Director at High Definition & Digital Cinema Ltd. (HDDC)
Peter A. Wilson began his career at 15 with an electronic and mechanical apprenticeship and subsequently worked in TV studio engineering before joining Sony Broadcast. He moved into HDTV in the mid-’80s, working on high definition (HD) productions, including the very first feature movie shot in HD, and eventually (for Sony Europe) setting up Europe’s first HD-to-35mm film-out facility using electron beam recording technology. In 1998, he helped to organize the technical facilities for the first digital cinema demonstration at IBC Brighton and today, as a founding director of the European Digital Cinema Forum (EDCF), he continues to focus on digital cinema interoperability. During his time at Snell & Wilcox, he earned a Technical Emmy for work on HD upconversion. Through HDDC, he now provides training in HDTV, UHDTV, and digital cinema matters. He is a British Kinematograph, Sound and Television Society (BKSTS) Fellow, director of the EDCF and Event Cinema Association (ECA).

Ikegami announces a new addition to its range of broadcast quality television cameras. The HDL-57 is a compact high-definition camera designed for use on remotely controlled pan/tilt heads in applications such as parliamentary television or robotic studios. It can also be used wherever a high-grade fixed-position compact camera is required for intercutting with the output from full-size studio cameras. Camera head and controller are housed in a single robust rectangular unit measuring 90 x 103 x 180 mm (width x depth x height) and weighing 1.5 kg. The HDL-57 can be operated remotely or via its rear control panel.

Three advanced 2.5 megapixel 2/3 inch CMOS sensors are employed to deliver wide dynamic range and, in principle, no smear. Each sensor incorporates active processing circuitry and delivers a digital output to the camera’s digital signal processor, all in a very small device with low power consumption. The sensors are equipped with native progressive and interlace modes. 1080/59.94i, 1080/50i, 720/59.94p, 720/50p and 1080/23.98p are available from the camera head. 1080/23.98p output is available as an option.

Full digital processing is employed within the HDL-57, from imagers to HD-SDI output, delivering high signal integrity and high picture quality as well as stable and reliable operation.  Master gain is processed through a high-grade low-noise amplifier with negative feedback. Video noise cancellation circuits deliver images of wide dynamic range even at high gain level. Specified performance parameters include F11 at 2,000 lux sensitivity, 60 dB signal-to-noise ratio and 1,000 television lines resolution in 1080i format (700 TVL in 720p format).

Among the operating features of the HDL-57 are six-position switchable gain (0 to +30 dB), six electric shutter speeds (1/100 to 1/2,000 second), four-position optical filter (100, 25, 6.2 and 1.6 per cent) and a two-position electronic colour correction filter (3,200 and 5,600 K). The optical filter wheel is motorised and can be operated from Ikegami remote control panels such as the RM-50B and OCP-300.  Using these filters in combination, the camera can handle a very wide range of lighting conditions. Auto-white-balance mode is available to cover the full range of colour temperatures.

The Ikegami HDL-57 operates on 12 volt DC power (11 to 16 volts), consuming 18 watts or less. It delivers two HD-SDI outputs and has a reference signal input accepting tri-level HD sync. The camera will be demonstrated on the Ikegami stand (11.A31) at IBC2015, Amsterdam, September 11-15.

Streamstar has released standalone live production and streaming studio software. This new possibility facilitates use with third party manufacturers of capture cards and other devices, which extend Streamstar’s product range to wider audience.

Streamstar SW is an advanced live production and streaming studio software loaded with professional features, including replay and slo-mo as standard, and an intuitive user interface designed to make production smarter, faster and easier, turning a desktop into a powerful multi-camera live production studio.

For a free product trial, click here.