Archive for August 8th, 2012

Audio specialist Sennheiser and Full Compass Systems, a national leader in professional audio, professional video, A/V, lighting and musical instrument sales, are co-sponsoring a special audio recording clinic on Tuesday, September 11th at the Full Compass facility in Madison, WI. The event will feature renowned, Grammy® award-winning sound engineer Leslie Ann Jones, who will demonstrate vocal recording techniques and cover best practices when recording live vocals in the studio.

Attendees will be provided with a pair of Sennheiser HD 449s, enabling them to monitor both recording and playback. The event will feature door prizes including a K-array Piccolo audio system, a Neumann TLM 102 microphone and a TRUE Systems P-SOLO microphone preamplifier.

Leslie Ann Jones, who is Director of Music Recording and Scoring with Skywalker Sound, has been a recording and mixing engineer for over 30 years. She began her career at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles in 1975 before moving to Northern California in 1978 to accept a staff position at the legendary Automatt Recording Studios. There she worked with such artists as Herbie Hancock, Bobby McFerrin, Holly Near, Angela Bofill, and Narada Michael Walden, and started her film score mixing career with “Apocalypse Now.”

From 1987 to 1997 she was a staff engineer at Capitol Studios located in the historic Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. She recorded projects with Rosemary Clooney, Michael Feinstein, Michelle Shocked, BeBe & CeCe Winans, and Marcus Miller, as well as the scores for several feature films and television shows.

In 2003, Leslie was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Recording, Classical, and received a Grammy Award for The Kronos Quartet’s recording of Berg: Lyric Suite, which won Best Chamber Music Album. This year, she won a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical for Quincy Porter: Complete Viola Works by Eliesha Nelson & John McLaughlin Williams.

Romanian cable operator repurposes HD broadcasts and maintains quality with Actus enterprise content management and rating analysis solution
 
Tel Aviv, Israel — August 8, 2012 — Actus Digital, a developer of web-based media monitoring, content repurposing and verification solutions for broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, IPTV, media and monitoring agencies, governments, regulators and content producers, announced the RCS & RDS successful HD launch leveraging the enterprise Actus media management platform. Actus business partner, Cellphone Group Romania, spearheaded the installation, deploying a high-resolution Actus media management and ratings analysis system that included capabilities for recording all broadcast channels in HD, editing broadcasted content, and re-broadcasting the repurposed content in full HD. With a three-month launch timeline, Actus was rolled out and ready for the debut of RCS & RDS’ HD News channel, Digi24.
 
“The Television market in Romania is undergoing a consolidation process, with a small number of public and private TV channels. Eighty percent of Romanian TV viewership is mainly through cable with RCS & RDS as a leading cable network provider,” says Sima Levy, president and CEO, Actus. “Given the amount of coverage area, a well-targeted broadcast delivery combined with efficient workflow for repurposing content is key to maintaining their high viewership.”
 
RCS & RDS is the leading provider of television services in Romania with over three million subscribers and an important provider of television services in Eastern Europe.
 
About RCS & RDS
RCS & RDS has developed its own telecommunications infrastructure over fiber optics and covers the services of cable TV, Internet, mobile and fixed over 200 cities. RCS & RDS in Romania is the market leader in providing Internet services and cable and satellite, and is the largest alternative provider of fixed telephony services. RCS & RDS is also one of the largest operators in the region, providing telecommunications services in Spain, Italy, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia and Serbia.
 
About Cellphone Group
CellPhone Group acts as a integrator and supplier for a diversified range of telecommunication solutions that addresses the current and future demands of wire line and wireless operators, ISP’s, carriers and newly emerging services providers.
 
About Actus Solutions
Actus Digital delivers industry-leading technology solutions for video content logging, tagging, monitoring, analysis and repurposing. Actus’ easy-to-use web-based solutions are answering the broadcast media management needs of broadcasters government agencies; cable, satellite & IPTV providers; advertising, media agencies & content producers; around the world. Actus Digital provides user-friendly solutions, which support an unlimited number of channel inputs, thereby facilitating greater functionality, efficiency, and saving costs, while providing enhanced video productivity across our clients’ organizations. Actus’ solutions enable media monitoring and reporting; analysis of content, ads and ratings; legal compliance; and extensive automated exporting tools for repurposing and rebroadcasting linear broadcasts to the Internet and mobile.
 
About Actus Digital
Actus Digital, a subsidiary of Taya Media Group, Israel’s premier video, media and visual communication content and technologies company, is a developer of web-based media monitoring, content repurposing and verification for broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, IPTV, media and monitoring agencies, governments and content producers. Leveraging emerging web technologies and IT standard hardware, Actus solutions are highly scalable systems ideal for cross-organizational content analysis and content repurposing. Actus next-generation solutions compliment any broadcast workflow, empowering operators with purpose-built tools for acquiring, viewing, analyzing and re-purposing transmissions from channels around the world. Their impressive customer list includes global media conglomerates among the likes of AirTel, FOX, SKY and Zee Networks. For more information, please visit: http://www.actusdigital.com.
 
Press Contact
Janice Dolan
Zazil Media Group
janice@zazilmediagroup.com
(cell) 617.817.6595
(fax) 617.812.7683
(skype) janicedolan
www.zazilmediagroup.com
 
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August 8, 2012 — This IBC, Orad will showcase its new PowerWall solution, a turnkey system for video wall productions. Based on the new Orad HDVG4 platform, PowerWall provides a synchronized 8k 1080p / 16k 1080i resolution output from a single box. This single PowerWall unit can output up to eight genlocked 3G or 16 HD SDI signals that can be tiled across the video wall according to the size and shape required.
 
PowerWall offers extremely high, ”pixelization-free” resolution display. This opens new production opportunities. Until now, broadcasters would use only long shots to avoid video wall pixelation. With PowerWall, this limitation is eliminated and operators can focus in at any level, including extreme zoom in.
 
PowerWall’s video resolutions range from 3840 x 1080 in the 2 x 1 setup, 3840 x 2160 in the 2 x 2 setup, up to 15360 x 2160 in an 8 x 2 (1080i) arrangement. This flexible approach is specifically designed to suit the broadcaster’s video wall.
 
The PowerWall Configurator lets broadcasters easily adjust video signal properties from the control PC. Users can adjust the size, position, edges and color balance of the whole wall or individual signals, as well as control the edge blending for the overlapping projector areas. There is no need to access the engineering controls on the video wall.
 
The new PowerWall offers up to 16 HD / SD video insertions, ensuring that the videos are an integral part of the scene and not merely overlaid on top.
 
PowerWall integrates seamlessly with 3DPlay, Maestro and TD Control, Orad’s broadcast production software.
 
For more information about PowerWall, visit Orad at IBC2012, booth 7.B27.
 
About Orad Hi-Tec Systems
Orad Hi-Tec Systems is a world-leading provider of real-time 3D broadcast graphic, video server, and media asset management solutions including news, channel branding, sports production and enhancement, elections and special events, virtual studios, and virtual advertisement. Orad’s compelling solutions streamline production workflow, enhance viewer experience, and improve production value. Founded in 1993, Orad is a public company listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (OHT). More information is available at http://www.orad.tv/.
 
For further information contact:
Orad Hi-Tec Systems Ltd
Ofir Benovici
Vice President Marketing
ofirb@orad.tv
 
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High Tech met Old World when top game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) staged its press event during the 2012 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) at LA’s century-old Orpheum Theatre with AV support from WorldStage. “The Download: EA 2012 Preview” provided guests with a first look at EA’s upcoming titles with live demos, world premiere trailers and breaking news.

“Electronic Arts is one of the world’s leading game publishers, and we at WorldStage were proud to be the chosen provider of innovative, state-of-the-art technical solutions for their press event,” says WorldStage project manager Jack Dussault.

EA’s Press Conference was broadcast live on MTV2, Spike and G4 television. The event was part of Spike TV’s “E3 All Access Live” coverage, which featured more than 17 hours of multi-platform coverage from the convention. The press event premiered such highly-anticipated games as SimCity, Crysis 3, Battlefield 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Madden NFL 13 (with a live appearance by NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irvin), FIFA 13 and other projects currently in development.

“Besides a live invitation-only presentation, this year 1080i, 720P, 480i and composite feeds went out worldwide to -over three million viewers,” Dussault notes. “It was streamed live from 11 sites, including IGN, Boxdownstairs, Stuff We Like, EA.com, JeuxVideo, GameSpot, EuroGamer (France), Game Informer and Gamers Bliss. After the event, the footage was posted to sites such as GameSpot and G4, eventually reaching an estimated virtual audience of over six million viewers.”

“This was the fifth year Debra Robins, owner and Executive Producer of Plumbago Productions brought our firm in to support the audio and video requirements of the EA press event,” says Senior Account Executive Michael May. “Each year Debra and Plumbago Productions’ Creative Director, Jeffrey Hornaday create a unique, “boundary pushing” technical stage design. We were extremely honored to once again be part of the production team.”

WorldStage provided an array of display surfaces for the Orpheum stage. A custom 50′ x 30′ voile scrim that hung across the front edge of the proscenium served as the display surface for a trio of Christie HD18K projectors mounted on the front of the balcony.

Three LED screens were positioned upstage behind the scrim: a 15×26-foot center screen, which was stationary, and 6.5×10-foot screens on either side, which flew in and out depending on the segment and the look desired. The LEDs were composed of approximately 200 PIXLED F-6 LED tiles.

“During certain segments of the presentation, the LEDs went black so you couldn’t see them behind the scrim,” recalls May. “Then we’d fire them up and you’d get an awesome three-dimensional visual experience.” The LEDs gave a lot of depth to the stage. There was only 1 presenter that appeared between the main led screen and the scrim. This was the CEO – during his introduction,

Rounding out the video gear were five HD cameras: three Hitachi SK-HD1000s, one of them on a 30-foot jib, and two Sony BRC-H700s robotic cameras, WorldStage’s Digital MediaHub players and a Spyder screen switching system.

On the audio side, “We retrofitted the client’s demo game sources and video sources with state-of-the-art HDMI to 5.1 analog audio decoders to feed center, subs, left/ right side and rear true 5.1 surround sound with over a half-million watts of amplification for a truly amazing surround audio application,” says Dussault.

The WorldStage team for the EA press event included Shane Zinke as EIC, Jason Spencer Spyder operator, Rob Ricci media hub playback, Ken Stanford video director, Justin “MC This” Hammond robocams, Terry Nakamura and Bryan Dominick projectionists, Ken “soundmantofthestars” Newman A1, Geoff Gibson A2 systems and Will Herold A2 RF.

WorldStage Inc., the company created by the merger of Scharff Weisberg Inc and Video Applications Inc, continues a thirty-year legacy of providing clients the widest variety of entertainment technology coupled with conscientious and imaginative engineering services. WorldStage provides audio, video and lighting equipment and services to the event, theatrical, broadcast and brand experience markets nationally and internationally.