26 November 2008
In a new exchange agreement, the International News Safety Institute,
INSI, and the Association for
International Broadcasting have become members of each other’s organisations.
The AIB has worked with INSI since the Institute was founded, providing
promotion and publicity for the news safety organisation. Most recently, the AIB
and INSI presented a joint award to Sami Al Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who
was arrested by US forces seven years ago and held without trial in Guantanamo
Bay until earlier this year.
Commenting on the new agreement, AIB CEO Simon Spanswick said "News safety is
of paramount importance to AIB members who provide international and regional
news services. We’re delighted to be able to formalise the co-operative
arrangements we have with INSI and we look forward to a closer working
relationship."
INSI is supported by many international news gathering organisations, and
provides safety training to journalists around the world.
25 November 2008
Sport TV, Portugals leading sports broadcaster, has just placed an order for an Enterprise sQ server system to enable it upgrade its operations to HD. Sport TV produces four premium sports channels; three are distributed via cable, DTH and IPTV platforms in Portugal and one by DTH in all Sub-Saharan Africa. All ingest and editing of the HD programs and promos will be carried out entirely within the new Enterprise sQ system. The order marks the first major move in the Portuguese market towards native HD broadcast production.
The new system will comprise a four port sQ 800 server and will have two eQ effects editors integrated in the system. Sport TV already carries out all of its news production on its existing SD Enterprise sQ system.
This is the first step of the planned migration of all our production facilities to HD, in this case made easy by the fact that we can keep the existing Quantel workflow and editing tools, said José M. Mourão, Sport TVs Technical and Operations Director.
The system was ordered through Ibertelco, Quantels representative in Portugal. We are very happy with this first order for an HD system because it shows that the original system installed to support just one SD channel grew up and it is now both a technical platform and a human structure able to broadcast four independent channels, which soon will become five, said João Pessanha, Ibertelcos Managing Director. Sport TV is a winning story and Ibertelco is proud to be part of that success.
19 November 2008
PANORAMAdtv, the video products division of Wohler Technologies Inc., today announced that Australia’s Global Television is installing Wohler audio and video monitoring equipment in two new state-of-the-art HD OB trucks. Wohler’s compact HD/SD monitoring solutions will simplify high-resolution audio and video monitoring of Global Television’s programming, which includes many of the country’s highest profile reality, entertainment, and sports programs.
“As the first units in Australia to deploy 3Gb/s ready infrastructure, our new HD trucks represent leading-edge broadcast technologies,” said Terry Manley, chief engineer at Global Television. “The Wohler equipment is an optimal fit, enabling robust and flexible monitoring of digital audio and high-resolution video while taking up very little space in our truck. Space, power, and weight savings are critical to cost-effective mobile production, and Wohler’s monitoring solutions meet all these requirements while offering the premium performance our clients demand in HD production.”
The extensive installation of Wohler gear within the Global Television OB trucks includes MON series rackmount LCD HD/SD video monitors, along with Wohler’s digital audio monitoring bridges for HD/SD video and digital audio monitoring. The compact yet flexible design of Wohler’s MON high-resolution display monitors is ideal for confidence monitoring of multiple video feeds in mobile applications where space is at a premium.
The MON4-2W/HR features four side-by-side 4.3-inch wide-format LCD panels, each with dedicated recessed controls for contrast and brightness, native 16:9 aspect ratio, and selection between 16:9 and 4:3 aspect ratios for SD-SDI signals, as well as tally indicators and independent power and input termination switches. Each LCD is mounted in a cylinder and thus may be rotated approximately ±30 degrees in the vertical plane for optimum operator viewing angles.
A total of nine MON4-2W/HR HD/SD rackmount LCD video monitors are being installed in each truck, providing 36 individual widescreen displays in just 18 RU. These units will support the bulk of Global Television’s video monitoring activity. Seven MON1-T/7W-HR 7-inch high-resolution HD/SD monitors will be mounted adjacent to Tektronix Waveform Monitors in a Tektronix tub to facilitate detailed signal analysis.
Each OB truck will be equipped with 14 of Wohler’s AMP1-S8MDA HD/SD embedded audio monitoring bridges and a single E MON-1/M audio bridge with built in Dolby® E decoding. The AMP1-S8MDA is a complete audio monitoring solution capable of monitoring audio from HD-SDI, SD-SDI, AES/EBU, and analog signal sources. The 1RU system processes and monitors up to eight channels from an HD-SDI or SD-SDI bit stream, two sets of four AES/EBU signal pairs (balanced and unbalanced), or eight balanced analog channels. Eight high-resolution 26-segment tricolor LED bar-graph audio-level meters provide accurate and instantaneous visual level monitoring at a glance.
Sydney-based Quinto Communications supplied the Wohler gear for Global Television. “This will be the largest deployment of Wohler monitoring equipment in an OB environment within Australia,” said Tom Pavicic, general manager of Quinto Communications.
The first of the two HD OB units will hit the road by the end of 2008, and the second will be completed in early 2009.
19 November 2008
Autocue, the leading provider of teleprompting and newsroom automation solutions, features new prompting software developments at IBC to cater for the growing number of customers working on Windows Vista and Mac operating platforms.
Autocues in-house software development team has responded to increasing requests from customers of its Professional and Starter ranges for compatibility with Windows Vista and Mac operating systems. QPro and QStart, the prompting software for the respective ranges, are now fully tested and compatible with these operating systems including Macs running Windows-emulating software.
According to Autocue CEO Hyman, Mac and Vista have become much more prominent over the last year. A major benefit of having a large in-house software development team is that we can respond quickly to our changing customer needs.
The upgrade to the new version of the software will be offered at a greatly reduced cost to existing customers, and available via a single download from the website.
19 November 2008
Autocue, the leading provider of teleprompting and newsroom automation solutions, will launch a major development of QMaster/ QBox IP-based prompting solution, at IBC in response to demand from Middle Eastern and Asian customers.
CEO Hyman says Autocue have seen massive growth in the last 18 months in the Middle East and Asia, particularly the Indian sub-continent. Hyman adds, Until now, we have only been able to offer our legacy software product based on the traditional PCI card – the technology still used by our competitors. The demand for a version of QMaster/ QBox that works with complex languages is clear and we have a list of customers waiting to upgrade as soon as its ready.
Autocue will use IBC 2008 to launch Arabic and Hindi language handling, but the core of the development work for these languages mean that all other complex languages will follow with minimal new development work.
Hyman continues, Weve had incredible success in launching QMaster/ QBox to our European language customers, who have fully embraced its unique benefits such as remote prompting and in-built resilience. The new language handling provides us with clear product differentiation in the biggest growth markets of the Middle East and Asia.
