2019 NAB Awards Roundup: Grass Valley, Panasonic, Ross Video, Quantum, and more take home show honours

NAB 2019 is officially in the books, and there is plenty of praise to go around. Here is a roundup of some the big award winners from the show, including Grass Valley, Panasonic, Ross Video, and Quantum.

Grass Valley Underlines Position as Frontrunner With Award Wins
Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, reiterated how its solutions help content creators, broadcasters and media organizations produce brilliant content. Two newly launched Grass Valley solutions, Grass Valley Creative Grading (GVCG) and GV STRATUS One, each brought home a Future Best of Show award, highlighting Grass Valley’s commitment to technology brilliance and bringing storytelling to the forefront. The Future Best of Show award honors outstanding new products exhibited at the NAB Show.

GVCG is unique in delivering intuitive, universal control that was previously unavailable to camera shaders. This innovative control panel and tablet application redefines the human interface, putting the user in full control of the creative power of Grass Valley cameras. As the number of adjustments a camera shader is required to make grows exponentially, many important features that can help address the reality of broadcast conditions are not easily accessible in today’s user interfaces. GVCG ensures that these functions are made available in a way that makes sense to camera shaders – regardless of their training or experience.

The highly versatile GV STRATUS One combines the next generation technology of GV STRATUS software with applications from GVRE transcoding, GV I/O servers, and EDIUS editing into a comprehensive, single box. This compact 2RU solution streamlines collaborative workflows, allowing customers to expand content creation without adding headcount. GV STRATUS One handles every aspect of the content management workflow from ingest, playout and recording through to transcoding and asset management. It also supports streaming to the web client and helps broadcasters overcome resource constraints to get content to viewers fast.

Panasonic’s Single-Chip Color Camera Honored with Emmy Award for Technology & Engineering Achievement
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) has honored the Panasonic Corporation with a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for Pioneering Development of the Single-Chip Color Camera. The Awards ceremony took place last evening in partnership with the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) at the NAB 2019 Show.

The NATAS’ committee determined that the genesis of the single-imager color video camera primarily took place between the proposal of a color filter array (CFA) in 1974 by Peter Dillon and the first commercial product from Hitachi in 1981, during which time Panasonic had done extensive development in realizing a single-chip interlace video camera including prototypes and publication. Panasonic’s core contribution was the “color difference line-sequential” CFA. This innovative approach was tolerant to interlace scanning, and relied on complementary colors that improved sensitivity and could easily be used to generate the Y, Pb Pr components required for a broadcast-type video signal.

Ross Video’s Ultrix IP Platform, Ultritouch Control System, Carbonite Ultra UHD Recognized at NAB 2019
Ultrix IP and Ultritouch, the latest additions to Ross Video’s Ultrix routing/AV processing platform, have been awarded Future Best of Show Awards from Government Video magazine and TV Technology respectively.

The Ultrix IP IO board allows customers to route and process signals via both IP & SDI transport streams agnostically using industry standards into Ultrix, the market’s most powerful and integrated software-defined platform.

Ultritouch is an incredibly flexible new touchscreen systems control and monitoring panel designed to help operators easily control and move between products and applications while maintaining the speed and fidelity of the equipment they are controlling. In addition, due to its integration with Ross Video’s network and control system DashBoard, Ultritouch controls a host of other Ross Video equipment and 3rd party devices.

Also, the Carbonite Ultra UHD, an upgrade to the latest Carbonite Ultra production switcher from Ross Video, has been decorated with a Future Best of Show Award from TV Technology Magazine as well as an inaugural NAB Product of the Year Award.

Carbonite Ultra UHD unlocks the 12G/UHD functionality of the feature-rich Carbonite Ultra production switcher, making it the definitive choice for UHD production applications. Both the Future Best of Show Awards and the new 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Awards recognize the most significant and promising new products and technologies being exhibited at the Show.

Quantum’s F-Series NVMe Storage Garners Two Industry Awards
Quantum’s new F-Series NVMe storage arrays received two industry awards during the 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The F-Series was named Best New Storage Technology winner in the 2019 NAB Show Product of the Year Awards, and also received the ProductionHUB Award of Excellence.

The Quantum F-Series is a high-performance, highly available and reliable storage array designed for studio editing, rendering, and other performance-intensive workloads for large unstructured data sets. The Quantum F-Series was designed specifically for video and video-like data, uses NVMe flash drives for ultra-fast reads and writes and to support a huge amount of parallel processing, and uses the latest networking technology to minimize latency between applications and storage. Relative to traditional SSD and HDD storage arrays, the Quantum F-Series is orders of magnitude faster, enables users to move from Fibre Channel SAN infrastructures to Ethernet infrastructures without giving up performance and gains back racks of data center space.

Incorporating the latest Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology, the F-Series provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices, delivering predictable, fast network performance. By combining these hardware features with the new Quantum Cloud Storage Platform – a software defined block storage stack tuned specifically for video and video-like data – and the StorNext® file system, the F-Series delivers end-to-end storage capabilities for post-production houses, broadcasters, and other rich media environments.

Adder Rewarded for Continued Innovation with Product of the Year Award
Adder Technology’s new ADDERLink INFINITY 4000 Series (ALIF4000) is a winner of the NAB 2019 Product of the Year in the Best New Hardware Infrastructure Technology category, according to an independent panel of judges at NAB Show 2019.

The ALIF4000 is the world’s first dual-head, high-performance 4K IP KVM extender over a single fiber and is the second world’s first launch from Adder, following its successful Zero U ADDERLink INFINITY 100T range in 2018.

The ALIF4000 delivers pixel-perfect, color accurate video quality, audio, and USB to single or dual 4K screens – benefitting broadcasters, post-production professionals or VFX specialists looking to improve their workflow and increase flexibility by making 4K content accessible from a single position or location.

Full compatibility with the existing ADDERLink INFINITY range means the ALIF4000 can be phased into an existing network without disruption, downtime or the costly need to rip and replace – giving media and broadcast professionals the access to 4K IP KVM when and where they need it most.

Cobalt Digital 9992 Encoder Series Receives TV Technology Best of Show Award
Cobalt Digital’s 9992-ENC series of HEVC/AVC/MPEG-2 encoders for openGear frames received the Future Best of Show Award presented by TV Technology magazine last week at the 2019 NAB Show.

Now in its sixth year, the Future Best of Show Awards at NAB program recognizes products based on innovation, feature set, cost efficiency, and performance in serving the industry. All nominated products are evaluated by a panel of engineers and industry experts, and are featured in a special Best of Show Awards Program Guide, which will be distributed digitally to more than 100,000 readers of seven Future publications.

A cost-effective choice for contribution, distribution, ENG, IPTV, and OTT solutions, the flexible 9992-ENC series offers customized I/O options and extensive audio support. It offers low-latency 8-bit and 10-bit 4:2:0 encoding, with optional license keys for HEVC and 4:2:2 encoding. Its pay-as-you-go licensing structure means users only pay for required features when needed. The 9992-ENC base model includes an 3G-SDI input, but can be upgraded to support four 3G-SDI (1080p60) signals or one 12G-SDI signal (4Kp60).

ENCO’s New enTranslate and Updated enCaption Solutions Win Best of Show
ENCO‘s launch of the new enTranslate automated, live translation system and upgrades to the enCaption4 automated captioning solution garnered the company two prestigious accolades at the 2019 NAB Show. enTranslate received Future’s Best of Show award presented by TV Technology, while the updated enCaption was similarly honored by Government Video.

The patented, software-defined enCaption4 solution provides automated closed and open captioning for live and pre-recorded content in near-real-time, enabling broadcasters and content producers to cost-effectively meet regulatory requirements and growing consumer demand. enCaption4 combines machine learning with a neural-network speech-to-text engine to deliver exceptional accuracy with extremely low latency. The newest enCaption 4 enhancements further improve its speech recognition precision and speed, while expanding the array of source integrations from which the system can learn new vocabulary and names. The new update also leverages AI to distinguish changes between people speaking even within a mixed audio feed.

enTranslate builds on enCaption’s powerful speech-to-text foundation with advanced translation powered by Veritone, making live and pre-recorded content understandable to non-native-speaking audiences by providing near-real-time translation for alternative-language closed captioning, in-venue subtitle displays and more. Blending artificial intelligence with sophisticated linguistics modelling to provide high-quality, context-aware translations, enTranslate offers broadcasters and live presenters an easy and affordable solution to automatically translate television programming, board meetings, legislative sessions, lectures, worship sermons and other content.

JVC CONNECTED CAM 500 Series Camcorders, 6000S Live Production/Streaming Studio Win Top Honors
JVC Professional Video’s new CONNECTED CAM 500 Series of streaming handheld camcorders received three Future Best of Show Awards at the 2019 NAB Show last week. The awards were presented by TV Technology, Digital Video, and Video Edge magazines. Plus, its new CONNECTED CAM Studio 6000S compact live production and streaming studio was named one of the Top 5 Products for Churches from NAB 2019 by Church Production magazine.

Available in June, the three compact 4K cameras – the GY‑HC500 base model, GY‑HC550 with advanced streaming and graphics, and GY-HC500SPC sports production camera – can record to SSD (solid state drive) media in 10-bit ProRes 422 at 4K resolution and 50/60p frame rates. The cameras also records several other native 4K UHD and HD file formats to support a wide range of workflows. All 500 Series cameras feature a 1-inch 4K CMOS imager and integrated 20x zoom lens with built-in ND filters and manual zoom, focus, and iris control rings. Other features include dual SDHC/SDXC media card slots, high resolution LCD screen for menu navigation, LCOS viewfinder, dual XLR inputs, and 3G-SDI and HDMI video outputs.

The Studio 6000S features a production switcher with six IP inputs that support NDI and SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) streaming protocols, as well as HD-SDI and HDMI sources. With a built-in H.264 encoder, the Studio 6000S supports up to 1080p streaming at up to 10 Mbps, with RTMP and MPEG-TS simultaneous output and direct streaming integration to Facebook Live and other CDNs. Other integrated features include an audio mixer, internal CG with templates, four layers of DSK, clip store with playback, integrated remote control for JVC PTZ production cameras, and multi-channel instant replay and slo-mo for sports productions.

Media Links Wins NAB Technolgy Innovation, IABM BaM Award
MediaKind is delivering live immersive consumer media experiences by winning the prestigious ‘NAB Technology Innovation Award’ for ‘Enabling 6K tiled 360-degree live sports streaming.’ Also, MediaKind and partners Deutsche Telekom, Tiledmedia, INVR.SPACE, and Magnum Film have won the IABM BaM Award for best ‘Project, collaboration or event’.

In a project commissioned by Deutsche Telekom, a live 360° video stream of the basketball match between Telekom Baskets Bonn and EWE Baskets Oldenburg was delivered from the Telekom Dome in Germany to Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta VR consumer app at 6K resolution on December 9, 2018. MediaKind managed the workflow as a key technology provider for the project commissioned by Deutsche Telekom. The live 360° video encoder was developed using MediaKind’s virtualized software encoding technology, integrating Tiledmedia’s tile-based video pre-processing and packaging, and deployed in Google Cloud Platform. Magnum Film was responsible for on-site 360° acquisition and production with INVR.SPACE providing and managing the cameras and the stitching platform.

The delivery of this award-winning solution demonstrates a live application of MediaKind’s new commercially launched Cygnus 360º as-a-Service (360aaS).

TVU Networks’ Innovations Honored as Best in Class by Variety of Outlets
TVU Networks announced industry-wide recognition of the new 4K version of its TVU One mobile IP transmitter, the TVU MediaMind Appliance AI-based metadata generation and search engine, and its IS+ proprietary transmission algorithm during last week’s 2019 NAB Show held in Las Vegas. TVU also provided mobile cellular transmitter equipment to producers of “NAB Show LIVE,” the official broadcast of the NAB. The live transmissions went flawlessly, and Broadcast Beat, producers of “NAB Show LIVE”, will continue to use TVU equipment at future events and venues.

In the first NAB Show 2019 Product of the Year Awards, TVU Networks won in the AI/Machine Learning category for its TVU MediaMind Appliance – an AI-based metadata generation and search engine that speeds production performance and content reuse. This is an independently judged awards program that recognizes the most significant and promising new products and technologies exhibited during NAB.

TV Technology magazine presented TVU Networks with a Best of Show Award for the TVU One 4K cellular mobile transmitter during the 2019 NAB Show. The awards are judged by a panel of industry experts on the criteria of innovation, feature set, cost efficiency and performance in serving the industry. All nominated products are featured in a special Best of Show Awards Program Guide, which will be distributed in digital edition form to more than 100,000 readers of seven Future publications.

PRODU presented TVU Networks with a NAB 2019 Tech Award for its IS+ technology. TVU’s proprietary transmission algorithm, IS+ enables users to simultaneously transmit over multiple mediums with sub-second latency. Thanks to IS+, TVU transmitters can simultaneously aggregate any combination of bandwidth mediums including cellular 3G/4G LTE, WiFi, Ethernet, Ka-band and Ku-band satellite, microwave, microwave mesh and BGAN to deliver a reliable and dependable broadcast picture with latency as low as 0.5 seconds. IS+ uses advanced Forward Error Correction technology to produce superior transmission performance. When compared to traditional FEC/ARQ methods, IS+ uses minimal data overhead without latency introduced by packet retransmission. The result is a reliable transmission with high-quality images and ultra-low latency even in a moving vehicle.

Veritone Attribute Wins NAB Show Product of the Year Award
Veritone’s Attribute application, a near real-time media attribution solution, received a Product of the Year Award in the Best New Radio Technology category at the recent 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The first official awards at the NAB Show, the program recognizes the most significant and promising new products and technologies showcased by exhibitors.

Veritone Attribute gives radio and television broadcasters the ability to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in near real-time. Attribute simply and intuitively makes connections between advertising campaigns and activity on the advertiser’s website within a user defined timespan. Attribute not only analyzes data related to prerecorded spots, but also to live reads and organic mentions. The information gleaned from Attribute gives broadcasters the ability to better contend with their digital counterparts, while at the same time providing advertisers a means to complement their digital advertising strategy by understanding campaign performance across multiple channels.

Other NAB 2019 Product of Year Award winners include:

  • AJA Video Systems — Ki Pro GO
  • Avid Technology — Pro Tools 2019
  • Blackmagic Design — DaVinci Resolve 16 / ATEM Constellation 8K
  • Canon — XF705 4K UHD Camcorder / REALiS 4K6020Z
  • Clear-Com — V-Series Iris
  • Fujinon — PREMISTA 28-100 T2.9
  • Haivision — Makito X4 Video Encoder / Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) Open Source Protocol
  • Limelight Networks — Realtime Streaming
  • MediaKind— PRISMA
  • Microsoft — Azure Media Services, Video Indexer – AI Editor
  • NewTek — Live Story Creator / NDI 4
  • Panasonic — AW-UE150 4K/60p pan/tilt/zoom camera
  • Signiant — Signiant Jet SaaS Solution
  • Sony Electronics — CBK-3610XS / BVM-HX310
  • Telestream — OptiQ / Vantage Cloud Port
  • Teradek — Bolt 4K 1500 XT Transmitter
  • The Telos Alliance — Axia iQx
  • VidOvation — VidOvation TV
  • Zype — Zype Playout

Other TV Technology Best of Show Award winners include:

  • Amazon Web Services — AWS Elemental MediaConnect
  • Blackmagic Design — ATEM Constellation 8K Switcher
  • Canon USA —DIGISUPER 122 / CJ18ex28B and CJ15ex8.5B
  • Cisco Systems — Cisco IP Fabric for Media
  • Clear-Com — V-Series Iris
  • Evertz — evEDGE Virtualized Processing Services / MediaFlow
  • Haivision — Secure Reliable Transport (SRT)
  • IHSE USA — Draco Ultra DisplayPort for Gamers
  • Imagine Communications — xG GamePlan ad inventory optimizer
  • Leader Electronics — LV5900 8K Waveform Monitor / LV5600 SDI/IP Hybrid Waveform Monitor
  • Limelight Networks — Realtime Streaming
  • LiveU — LiveU Matrix cloud video management
  • Mobile TV Group — 45 FLEX IP Mobile Production Unit
  • NewTek — NewTek VMC Software / NDI 4.0
  • Signiant — Signiant Jet SaaS Solution
  • Sony Electronics — Live Element Orchestrator / Ci MediaLog
  • Sportzcast — ScoreHub data & graphics distribution
  • Telestream — Vantage Cloud Port
  • Teradek — Bolt 4K 1500 XT Transmitter
  • Vislink Technologies— HCAM 4K UHD Wireless Camera Solution

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