Pro Tools is in a pretty strong place right now. It leads the market in every audio field, it has a great stable of interfaces for any size of system from bedroom rock stars like me to feature mixing theatres in Soho’s most exclusive facilities. There’s no gaping holes in the hardware range and Avid’s ever increasing acceptance of 3^rd party hardware and affordable software pricing mean it’s a more popular product than ever.

So what can they add to the product line to get IBC attendees exited?

Sometimes a piece of tech comes along and just leaves you smiling.

The team at Sixty have done this, they have come up with an idea that is truly ground breaking.

I remember the day that I could see the steam rise above my beloved Wasps pack in glorious HD, the first time I saw game plays annotated at half time by the pundits and now I am getting excited about the first time I’ll be able to interact with the graphical data provided to me by the broadcaster.

Telestream

The most significant development for me from Telestream came in the form of their Livespeed  Live Capture-Aspera FASPex-Vantage Integration. A simple and elegant solution with the following steps:

• Take your live SDI or IP feed into the Lightspeed Capture hardware.
• Store to local Storage whilst also using Aspera Faspex to move the captured content over secure, accelerated UDP transport.
• At the same time as Faspex delivering to your onsite Faspex server you can also deliver the growing files to your Cloud Storage.

One of our objectives this year was to find KVM’s.

Its fair to say that in the past infrastructure items like this have been overlooked by both the technical and sales team. We wanted to find a reliable quality solution for both traditional point to point KVM and an IP solution.

First up we visited IHSE. They have been in the KVM market for over 30 years and have experience in the medical, air traffic control and government sector and most importantly to Tyrell the Broadcast and Post Production industry.

I have had a long relationship with the guys over at Empress so I was pleased when Tyrell was announced as a reseller.

Empress started out as supplier of media such as BetaSP Digibeta and LTO tape. During the transition to tapeless workflows it was clear that they needed to penetrate different markets, they had the vision to see that people were creating archives from their tapes but these were not being managed and clients could not find the rushes that they had spent so much money on creating.

Monitors Monitor Monitors…

They are there in their thousands at every IBC, every stand has at least one, usually more. However we were not interested in the run of the mill home TV’s that were being used for the standard death by powerpoint presentations, we were after something a little more special. Guess what, in true Tyrell style we found it across two stands.

First up we visited JVC, the visit was to see a couple of things, in honesty we wanted to see their latest PTZ Camera for our ever-growing portfolio of live streaming packages.

Remember Sony BetaMax and the VHS format wars?  Do you get a comfort feeling from CCIR 601 and know that SDI just simply worked?

But the SDI replacement format war has already happened, in fact, it’s almost over.

In the 2017 BVE, I saw a number of manufacturers had adopted of NDI, Newtek’s answer to Digital Video over IP. Newtek had made it so easy to integrate NDI, I was puzzled why so many other manufacturers hadn’t adopted a Video IP Protocol and why had Sony already conceded that no further development in its Network Media Interface (NMI)?

The big launch for Atomos was the Sumo 19M which is like a younger sibling to the full blown Sumo but is a monitor only option (I’m guessing this is what the ‘M’ is in its name?) so it doesn’t have any of the features of the recorder, but it’s still looks as cool as the Sumo with the same casing. Where it becomes a bit confusing is although it can throughput 4K/UHD it is only a 1920×1080 display which might catch some people out it down converts to HD.

Our friends in Ottowa have a number of new features and partnerships for the 2017 IBC.

• Improved UI, whilst small as a feature is always very much welcomed by users. The team are at File Catalyst are happy to say that they are moving to a more bolder look.
• The more strategic announcement is their partnership with Acembly (http://www.acembly.com/). Acembly provide Cloud Storage management for the likes of Azure, Google, Amazon, Qumulo and Private Cloud within the one single browser.You can well imagine the levels of administration that Acembly can do, including presenting the cost of each bucket, which isn’t the easiest of tasks.

LiveU continued to a very busy stand, this year it was helped this year by the LiveU IBC Studio Set, hosted by Michael Artsis, a 3 camera setup that was transmitted back to the BeTerrific Production Studio back in the US, proving that the LiveU ecosystem can help to produce remote productions, as well as the traditional ENG News Camera back to studio, they were using the new LU600 HEVC units, producing great picture quality and ensuring its all in sync, all the camera signals picked up by the LiveU LU2000 server.