Evertz Highlights Dreamcatcher’s Role in 4K Sports Productions
Few products have garnered as much attention at recent NAB and IBC trade shows than Evertz’s Dreamcatcher slow-motion replay system. At NAB 2013 this week, Evertz continued its push into the replay space by highlighting Dreamcatcher’s next-generation capabilities when it comes to the hottest topic of the show, 4K, as well as its Mosaic features.
Dreamcatcher has now been used in the 4K-production workflow in several high-profile sports events, including CBS Sports’ AFC Championship and Super Bowl XLVII telecasts, Fox Sports’ Daytona 500 coverage, and MLB Networks’ coverage of the World Baseball Classic. And don’t expect that momentum to stop anytime soon.
“Over the last four months, [Dreamcatcher] has gone to air for a number of 4K technologies,” Mo Goyal, Director of Product Marketing, Evertz, said at the company’s press conference on Sunday. “CBS Sports has used it during the NFL season as part of their Hyperzoom technology. What they are able to do is use a 4K camera and then zoom in to a few replays. In fact, in one of the games, we turned over a touchdown based on a review with an angle that we had.”
Dreamcatcher and Its Dreamy 4K
Dreamcatcher’s “super-zoom” capability has also allowed broadcasters to zoom in on key plays and extract an HD image from the larger 4K frame, providing perfectly visible images of close plays on the field (e.g., a receiver’s toe on a sideline in NFL coverage).
In addition, Dreamcatcher’s Mosaic feature allows multiple angles to be synchronized and played out at a single button press, offering production teams the ability to show the captured event from new perspectives.
Based on Evertz’s VUE, Dreamcatcher is the first to use multitouch interfaces to simplify the way operators prepare instant replays and highlights packages. Dreamcatcher’s interface allows operators easy access to various controls (such as router control) while providing an integrated multiviewer system. Dreamcatcher also integrates with Evertz’s MAGNUM (unified facility control) and Mediator (content-management system) to allow an optimized workflow from live production of an event to its broadcast across multiple platforms.
10-Gig Ready To Go
In that same 4K vein, Evertz is set to demo 3080IPX and 3080IPG, the first of many products the company expects to release that route video over 10Gbps Ethernet. These 10Gbps Ethernet products offer cable reduction through the transport of multiple HD videos over a single 10GbE cable, native support of fiber-optic distribution, the ability to create distributed routing architectures, and the ability to scale to larger I/O sizes versus today’s SDI video routers.
To effectively make use of 10Gbps Ethernet for broadcast-style routing, Evertz has simplified the control by extending its MAGNUM unified facility control to treat the 10Gbps Ethernet switch fabric as a video router. Evertz MAGNUM control system turns the Ethernet-based switch into a virtual video router, where operations have the same level of control they have come to expect from a traditional SDI router. Operations can seamlessly migrate from an SDI-based facility to a 10GbE-based facility without replacing the existing broadcast-control system from Evertz.
Control Room of the Future
Evertz also continues to push its “Control Room of the Future,” a strategy the company has long promoted in its Playout and Content Management solution. According to Evertz, this concept can deliver multiple channels while maintaining lower operating costs. Evertz will allow content managers to operate in a monitoring-by-exception environment by integrating Mediator, VUE, and VistaLINK PRO into a “three-screen” approach.
Individually, Mediator, VUE and VistaLINK PRO can control and manage many discrete parts of the content-delivery workflow: from cameras/ingest to servers to signal processing to routing to master control to transmission. The control room of the future integrates these three systems into a near-field single ecosystem.