Client News
Mo-Sys Launch U50 Remote Camera Control Head for Box Lenses
London, UK, 2 June 2020: Mo-Sys Engineering, a global leader in real time camera tracking and remote systems, today announced the launch of U50. Designed and manufactured during the lockdown period, the U50 is a heavy-duty remote head that enables camera operators to safely return to work and control the biggest box lenses and heaviest broadcast camera set-ups remotely.
Offering the ultimate for camera remote control and remote production, U50 combats the current challenges and unique requirements in the Covid-19 affected world. Making it possible to operate large box lenses and cameras remotely, U50 achieves the same precision and agility when camera operators are controlling manually and on-site. With no other remote head capable of smoothly and quickly operating box lenses and with on-site production crews dramatically decreasing, this innovation offers a new solution to tackle current challenges.
Danny Zemanek, Freelance Camera Operator explained, “Previously remote production technology was an additional cost for broadcasters, but now it is essential to ensure camera operators can work safely. The U50 remote head from Mo-Sys represents a new way that operators can control big box lenses with the same precision and agility that we have come to expect.”
Built on the same high-precision backlash free drives in the successful Mo-Sys L40 remote head, the U50 head enables fast acceleration and deceleration of heavy broadcast camera packages with super telephoto lenses of up to 50kg. The unique combination of a U-shape space-frame design and zero backlash drives give U50 enough strength to achieve fast panning shots with no bouncing, even when zoomed in. Whether you are following a puck in an Ice Hockey game or trailing F1 cars on a racetrack, U50 allows you to precisely follow the action.
The U50 is specifically designed to allow remote operation, eliminating the need for operators to manually pan and tilt the camera onsite. Instead they can move the camera remotely from a control room with an intuitive pan bar that translates operator movements 1:1 to the remote head. And with the Mo-Sys TimeCam option soon to be made available, U50 has the potential to be operated anywhere in the world with virtually no delay by using Mo-Sys’ delay compensated global remote-control technique.
Michael Geissler, CEO Mo-Sys Engineering Ltd said, “Our U50 is ideal for sporting events and long-range filming environments. At the core of the U50 are our highly robust pan and tilt motors with zero backlash, providing lag-free operation. Using the power and sturdiness of the Mo-Sys L40 pan and tilt motors, but now with a double space-frame design, the U50 is Mo-Sys’ strongest head to date.”
Extremely strong and backlash-free drive units give operators instant and delay-free control. The precise gear drives enable flawless operation even with the biggest zoom lenses, unlike worm gear drives which can cause judder. The hole through the centre of the gear boxes for cable pass-through removes the need for slip-rings and makes it future-proof for high bandwidth digital video. This also allows for tangle free direct cabling.
Geissler added, “Just like the rest of our broadcast robotics and film remote heads, the U50 can be operated with a variety of input devices such as hand-wheels, pan-bar or joystick. It can be connected through a bus cable, ethernet or fibre for long distances. The button-console interface provides controls for pan/tilt velocity adjustment, input smoothing and direction, user defined position limits with feathering and axes zeroing.
“Whether you’re a freelance cameraman, work in production, broadcast, OBs, rental, virtual events, corporate or sports,” Geissler concluded, “Our U50 simplifies the operation of the head in remote-mode making it ideal for all those operating and involved – be they technical or not.”
Intinor connects to the American broadcast industry through JB&A and NewTek
Umea, Sweden, 01 June 2020 — Intinor Technology, Sweden’s leading developer of products and solutions for high quality video over internet, is working closely with American companies JB&A, a value add distributor specialising in the field of video, broadcast, production & proAV, and NewTek, the leader in IP-based video technology, to connect with the American broadcast industry.
At a time when travel and face to face meetings are restricted, Intinor has been keen to work closely with its regional partners across the globe to find alternative ways to connect with local broadcasting companies, offering webinars and online demonstrations with the opportunity for live Q&A sessions.
This is a particularly important time for Intinor to connect with customers. The ongoing crisis is leading many companies to re-evaluate their production facilities and to consider creating new remote production workflows that not only overcome the current challenges of social distancing but also offer long-term economic and productivity benefits. Intinor’s solutions are known as the “Swedish Army Knife” for an all-IP infrastructure.
Daniel Lundstedt, Marketing Coordinator for Intinor said: “In these challenging times, the broadcast industry and producers are looking for alternative ways to distribute and produce their content. Most broadcasters are used to working with secure connections, using satellite or dedicated fiber, and have been wary of using the public internet due to the risk of packet loss, latency issues on networks etc.
“One of the major challenges in switching from the more traditional workflows to remote production is how to get around the inherent instability of the public internet” Lundstedt continues. “That’s where Intinor comes in because that’s what we do all the time.”
JB&A has been Intinor’s exclusive distributor in the USA for years and the two companies regularly run joint events. The webinar, which ran live on April 14th 2020 and is available to view on YouTube, aimed to educate viewers about REMI production (REMote Integration), REME (REMote Editorial viewing) and to demonstrate how broadcasters can implement these using the solutions that Intinor offers. Nicholas Smith, JB&A’s VP of Technology, hosted the event from Folsom, CA with Daniel Lundstedt representing Intinor from its base in Umea, Sweden.
Moving on from an introductory presentation, the webinar demonstrated the interoperability of Intinor’s Direkt product family, using many different input streams, laptops, mobile phones as well as encoders, as part of the production.
They also demonstrated Intinor’s own transport protocol, Bifrost BRT™, that has forward error correction, adaptive bitrate, ARQ, or resending, and network bonding. Other protocols are also supported, including SRT and many others.
Another American company that Intinor has often partnered with is NewTek. Intinor was due to promote its Direkt router studio alongside NewTek in the NDI® Pavilion at NAB this year as the products from these two companies fit together nicely in a Remote Production Workflow using content from a variety of sources. Since JB&A are also distributors for Newtek, this offers perfect synergy and value add for all three companies involved as well as their clients.
With the cancellation of NAB and numerous other industry shows due to COVID-19, NewTek has created its own TV channel, NewTekTV. NewTekTV aims to keep people up-to-date on technology news, live demos, support and expert advice as well as showing in itself the flexibility of IP-based, software-defined visual storytelling (#SDVS) on a global basis.
In their latest broadcast, focusing on how to keep sports fans engaged when there’s no sports going on, Lundstedt was invited on as a guest speaker to talk about how Intinor is using NDI® to help keep the world connected.
NewTekTV’s host, Richard Evans, was interested to hear about the remote workflows that Intinor offers and how Intinor’s Direkt router studio works with NewTek’s Tricaster to provide a complete solution for remote production.
“The Direkt router studio supports input from different IP streams, such as SRT, RTMP, or Intinor’s own protocol, BRT™ Bifrost, all of which offer ways to handle secure transmission even over poor internet connections” explained Lundstedt. “Content collected via the Direkt router can then be sent via NDI® to NewTek’s Tricasters which provide all the tools necessary for media production. Once the production is complete, this can then be transmitted via NDI® again back to the Direkt router which handles the broadcast of the finalised content, sending to multiple partners if required.”
Further webinars and online demos are planned. Check out Intinor’s Upcoming Events for more details.
Cinegy announces TURBOCUT - Making Editing with Adobe Premiere Faster than Ever
Munich, Germany, 28 May 2020 - Cinegy today announced TURBOCUT, a new Adobe CC plug-in which significantly accelerates the editing of H.264/HEVC by utilising the NVIDIA GPU’s hardware decoder. This announcement coincides with Adobe releasing version 14.2 of Adobe Premiere with several new features added, but still missing NVIDIA hardware accelerated editing and using the NVIDIA GPU for decoding H.264 and HEVC.
As Jan Weigner, CEO Cinegy GmbH explained, “For many years, tens of thousands of users have been using the Daniel2 Plug-in for Adobe CC, which already offered the NVIDIA accelerated export of H.264 and HEVC. So when we accelerated the editing and import features, it was obvious that the original product name didn’t match the main goal of the plug-in with the Daniel2 video codec technology. TURBOCUT enables faster editing and production with better video quality and it’s also much easier to remember than Daniel2 Plugin for Adobe CC!
“This may not be that important for an owner of a dual 28-core Xeon processor workstation”, Weigner added, “but for those editing on a laptop or small PC and lucky enough to have a recent NVIDIA card installed, TURBOCUT will make a dramatic difference to their editing performance.”
The other main feature of TURBOCUT is that it brings the Daniel2 video codec to Adobe CC. When editing in the Daniel2 video format, which is the equivalent to Apple’s ProRes or AVID’s DNxHR, editing in 8K resolutions or higher is easily possible, even on relatively small machines (e.g. quad core processor) or laptops.
In addition, the TURBOCUT plug-in enables the use of the Daniel2 video codec as a preview file format, providing another significant performance boost over all other codecs. No matter what source format you are editing in, this will improve editing performance – and it’s free, as it’s always been, and available now for download from www.turbocut.com.
TURBOCUT and Daniel2 are trademarks of Cinegy LLC. Cinegy is a registered trademark of Cinegy LLC.
Intinor to Demonstrate How to Do Remote Production in Live Webinars With Skaarhoj
Umea, Sweden 21 May 2020 — Intinor Technology, Sweden’s leading developer of products and solutions for high quality video over the internet, will be demonstrating how to do remote production in a series of live webinars with Danish company Skaarhoj, manufacturers of universal broadcast control panels. The aim is to showcase how the remote production tools from both Intinor and Skaarhoj complement each other to give a flexible, secure workflow for live production using a variety of different content sources and locations.
Interest in remote production workflows (or REMI) has been on the increase for some time now already. Even before the current global social distancing requirements created an added incentive for broadcasting companies to seek an alternative to the traditional travel-dependent methods of production, the economic and productivity benefits that REMI offers enables companies to more easily meet the rising demand for live content.
The live webinars in themselves will be remote productions between Denmark and Sweden with PTZ cameras in Intinor’s base in Umea, Sweden, and at another location in Stockholm, Sweden, being remotely controlled by Skaarhoj’s control panels at their headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“Our mission is to ease the use of broadcast hardware for people making live video” says Skaarhoj’s CEO, Founder and Chief Designer, Kasper Skårhøj. “Our universal broadcast controllers give content producers an incredibly flexible hardware platform for their ever changing control needs.”
Skaarhoj is running weekly webinars demonstrating their controllers in action. For the webinar with Intinor, the inputs from a variety of sources will be managed using Intinor’s Direkt router studio. The interoperability Intinor provides is a big advantage to live remote productions where content may be coming in from cameras, laptop and even mobile phones via a variety of different IP streams and protocols.
Daniel Lundstedt, Marketing Coordinator for Intinor, says “The Direkt router studio supports input from different IP streams, such as SRT, RTMP, or Intinor’s own protocol, BRT™ Bifrost, all of which offer ways to handle secure transmission even over poor internet connections.”
“One of the major challenges in switching from the more traditional workflows to remote production is how to get around the inherent instability of the public internet” continues Lundstedt. “That’s where Intinor comes in because that’s what we do all the time.”
Intinor’s own transport protocol, Bifrost BRT™, will be demonstrated during the webinar. This offers forward error correction, adaptive bitrate, ARQ, or resending, and network bonding.
Lundstedt added “We aim to show people how they can save money and time by setting up a remote production workflow and cutting out what becomes unnecessary travel. There are many benefits to a remote workflow and, in these times, it is an essential tool.”
The webinars will run on Tuesday May 26th at various different times to allow for global time preferences: (follow links to sign up)
• 8 AM CEST for APAC & MEA
• 4 PM CEST for EUROPE (and US)
• 8 PM CEST for US
Further webinars and online demos are planned. Check out Intinor’s Upcoming Events for more details.
Cinegy partners with US Broadcast to promote software-based solutions in North America
Munich, Germany, 20 May 2020 – Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software in the cloud has announced a new partnership with New Hampshire-based US Broadcast, a broadcast distributor that uses its channel marketing and technical skill sets to tailor sales for the North American market.
US Broadcast CTO Eric Pratt said, "US Broadcast is currently busy aiding resellers and customers with the technical challenges of connecting video and audio workflows, using our expertise in IP video and remote production to solve their problems. Lately, we’ve had an increase in enquiries with customers looking for help bridging the distance between contributors and production and we’re finding Cinegy’s software-based solutions are particularly relevant at this time.”
“Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) in particular,” Pratt continued, “is a technology that Cinegy integrates well to help meet this need in their media ingest, playout, and management. Being able to connect remote news anchors, venues, and facilities to their production workflow is important under normal circumstances, and now it’s imperative. Additionally, Cinegy’s software range fits perfectly with the other products in our vendor line card, making it an ideal partnership.”
Cinegy Managing Director, Co-owner, and Co-founder Daniella Weigner said, “US Broadcast has a long history of working with the film, television, broadcasting, and streaming industries, for small organizations and large. They understand the unique needs of the industry and only represent “best-of-breed" products and services that deliver real value for their customers. We are delighted to add our product range and expertise to US Broadcast’s complementary portfolio.”
One part of that portfolio of particular interest to the North American facilities is Cinegy TV Pack. This high-value, low-cost studio-in-a-box includes a full license for Cinegy’s industry leading Cinegy Air PRO playout software with Cinegy Titler branding, Cinegy Capture, four channels of Cinegy Multiviewer, the revolutionary Cinegy Live PRO IP video switcher, ultra-modern transcoding with Cinegy Convert and Cinegy Player, the company’s vastly superior video player.
Pratt added, “Cinegy’s full support across its range for SRT is a major advantage for Cinegy end users that we very much look forward to sharing with our North American customers.”
More information can be found by visiting www.cinegy.com.
GB Labs qualifies ATTO 360 Tuning, Monitoring, and Analytics Software to achieve even faster performance
Aldermaston, UK, 18 May 2020: The leader in intelligent storage solutions, GB Labs, has announced a development partnership with ATTO Technology, Inc., a global leader of network, storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions, and has qualified ATTO 360™ Tuning, Monitoring, and Analytics Software with GB Labs CORE.4 operating system.
A network built with ATTO FastFrame™ Ethernet adapters and ThunderLink® Thunderbolt™ adapters can be optimised to perform far better than what’s commonly expected of Ethernet networks. ATTO 360 Tuning, Monitoring, and Analytics Software helps users easily and quickly tune networks to achieve maximum performance.
GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland said, “Any storage system can only be as good as the quality of the connection it has to creative workstations or processing platforms. This is especially true of our high-end Space and FastNAS platforms, which are so powerful and intuitive that they can actually be let down by a substandard link to the workstations they are there to drive.”
“We have now qualified ATTO 360 software with our CORE.4 OS environment, which means that users of both technologies can be confident they are consistently getting the top performance and most efficient operation from all systems at all times.”
"This application of ATTO 360 is exactly what it was designed for, which is to make it easy to optimise and manage networks," said Tom Kolniak, senior director of marketing at ATTO Technology. "We think GB Labs customers will really appreciate what 360 can do."
With some storage systems, users can struggle to find the optimum network settings and monitoring the speed of multiple connections can also be a challenge. Equally, fine tuning a network configuration for a specific type of workflow can be hit or miss. For example, those working with image sequences at high resolutions or VFX creatives have different demands on a network than those working with audio.
GB Labs systems, on the other hand, use learning algorithms that automatically adjust storage performance to always deliver the power when and where it is needed. However, even this is entirely dependent on a network storage infrastructure being well tuned.
Harland added, “Our in-house R&D team found that partnering our systems with ATTO 360 Ethernet tuning capabilities makes it very easy to configure and enable pre-sets for certain file types that in turn take full advantage of the newly optimised connection speed to get the most out of our storage solutions.
“The ability to instantly select between high throughput, low latency and multi-stream settings at the click of a button for each profile, makes ATTO 360 an equally intuitive complement to enable our range of systems to improve respective workflows even more.”
iSIZE Technologies graduates from inaugural Oxford CDL and raises £740k from notable Silicon Valley angel and institutional investors
London, UK, 14 May 2020: Deep-tech company iSIZE Technologies has today announced the closure of its first seed funding round, raising a total of £740k from figures including Patrick Pichette, partner at Inovia Capital and ex- Google CFO; TD Veen AS, a notable Norwegian family office; and a number of other CDL investors. This round brings iSize total funding to date to over £1.3m.
The round was led by some of the leading tech investors of the inaugural Creative Destruction Lab programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. iSIZE graduates the accelerator programme this month alongside only nine others, from over 250 applications, after an intensive nine-month programme.
iSIZE specialises in deep learning for video delivery and has developed a deep perceptual 'precoder' - a software solution that uses AI-trained to optimise visual quality in order to save video bitrate during encoding. Its flagship product, BitSave, available both as a SaaS platform at bitsave.tech and for on-premise use, reduces encoding bitrates by up to 40%, while at the same time enhancing video perceptual quality. This results in substantial data, energy and cost savings for both the company hosting the video and the end consumer.
Speaking after the round closed Pichette said: “Video capacity needs are exploding worldwide, with no end in sight for years to come. Managing capacity and costs are now becoming a strategic issue for many bandwidth providers, and iSIZE addresses this problem head on, with an innovative, amazingly elegant, platform agnostic solution. The results speak for themselves.”
CEO of iSIZE Technologies, Sergio Grce, added: “We are thrilled to have graduated from the CDL-Oxford and closed this seed funding round; our thanks to all our investors who see the potential of our technology to transform the world of streaming. Data centres contribute more global emissions than the aviation industry, and with lockdowns across the globe ever more people are turning to video content for entertainment or remote working. We are proud to be working with household names in the sector to reduce the strain on already-overburdened networks and cut the ballooning costs of the data centre and streaming industries.”
Board Advisor Paul Massara, ex-CEO of Npower, agreed with Grce: “I am very excited about the difference iSIZE can make to reducing both the cost and carbon associated with streaming, and glad to be involved on the Board. It is essential that we leverage advanced AI techniques to move to a low carbon economy, and the big data users should take note from a corporate social responsibility perspective.”
A leading investor in the round, CEO of TD Veen AS, Kjell Skappel concluded, “We often assume the internet is a solely virtual entity, but it has its roots in a very real chain of data centres, with very real energy and emissions costs. iSIZE’s solution is easy for tech giants to apply and brings significant benefits, so we are delighted to be part of bringing BitSave to a wider market.”
iSIZE now has its sights set on helping the giants of video streaming meet the challenges of an ever-increasing demand for high-quality video content; reducing the data cost of streaming video while simultaneously improving visual quality.
Mo-Sys Launch LiveLab With Panasonic
London, UK, 4 May 2020: Mo-Sys Engineering, a global leader in real time camera tracking and remote systems, is proud to announce a collaboration with Panasonic. The AW-UE150 and the Mo-Sys StarTracker module will empower AR and virtual studio graphics by together creating engaging content with natural depth and changing the perspective of the virtual background.
Previously planned to launch at NAB, the webinars will be co-hosted by Panasonic and Mo-Sys and will showcase the new Panasonic AW-UE150 - a 4K, wide-angle lens, PTZ head with absolute camera tracking for AR and virtual studio application. With Mo-Sys StarTracker, the venue or event is no longer restricted to a fixed camera position and can be more creative using the PTZ head on a jib, crane or a dolly for unlimited camera motion.
There are two sessions on offer:
10:00 (BST) - Thursday 7th May 2020 - Sign-up to webinar
18:00 (BST) - Thursday 7th May 2020 - Sign-up to webinar
Mo-Sys CEO Michael Geissler said, “Although disappointed that we could not launch at NAB, these webinars are a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate this innovative collaboration, helping a wide range of customers generate immersive and engaging content for AR and virtual studio applications. We are proud of our partnership with Panasonic and excited to showcase what is possible.”
Kit Barritt joins Pixel Power as training manager
Cambridge, UK, 1 May 2020: Well known, highly experienced project manager Kit Barritt has joined Pixel Power in the newly created role of training manager. Bringing with him a wealth of experience in creating and delivering training and induction processes to broadcasters and production facilities worldwide, Barritt will bring a fresh slant on training: internal and external; on site and online.
“Pixel Power is at the forefront of the industry as television moves to virtualized and cloud-based solutions,” Barritt said. “The company recognises that this means a shift in skills set, so training is a critical factor in the success of any project. My role is to strengthen training as an integral part of the Pixel Power offering, ensuring our customers achieve their business, operational and technical goals.”
By building training and skills development into the project, Pixel Power aims to ensure the customer and implementation team remain closely engaged, understanding and approving each phase. Through his understanding of solution development – most recently he was project manager on a large-scale station refurbishment in the Middle East – Barritt will ensure timely and appropriate training, adding further to Pixel Power’s reputation for successful delivery, from the initial approach throughout the systems’ lifecycle.
“While Kit joined Pixel Power at a great time for us it’s a challenging time for everyone in the industry – he hasn’t been able to meet many of his new colleagues personally yet! It is clear to us that broadcasting and production will be changed by the current crisis, and we have to be prepared for a new normal,” said James Gilbert, CEO of Pixel Power. “Social distancing has really demonstrated how invaluable automated workflows can be, and how new workflows and operating procedures need to be brought on line swiftly and surely.”
“That is why we are investing in training and support, not least by recruiting Kit to the team,” Gilbert continued. “Kit will not only work with our project teams on major new installations, he will use his experience in online training and skills development. Expect more focused webinars and ‘how to’ quick tip videos from us.”
Kit Barritt joined Pixel Power in April 2020, reporting to Peter Crouch, head of global support and services. Based at Pixel Power’s corporate headquarters in Cambridge, UK he has a worldwide brief.
‘Showtime Pixel Power’ launches
Cambridge, UK, 23rd April 2020: Pixel Power is hosting a massive personalised customer engagement programme with a series of over a hundred one-to-one online meetings over the next six weeks. The aim is to replicate the best and most important aspects of a tradeshow - conversations with customers about their projects and how our technology can help.
“Listening to our customers’ needs is at the heart of what we have always done at Pixel Power – it’s why we are trusted to deliver on what we say we will”, explained James Gilbert, CEO, Pixel Power. “At this time of global lockdown and with all tradeshows either cancelled or postponed, we wanted to find an alternative method to replicate those confidential one-to-one meetings between our customers and technology colleagues”.
“We believe that this ‘new normal’ offers new opportunities too. Software defined, virtualizable playout solutions enable broadcasters to be very flexibile very quickly and we are already witnessing this with existing installations. While this is a challenging time for us all, we are busy helping customers manage playout infrastructure in ways that were just dreams only a couple of years ago. Their investments in virtualizable, flexible master control playout are paying off”.
Showtime Pixel Power is replacing social-distancing with social-connecting while maintaining the physical distancing measures in place throughout the world. The Showtime Pixel Power programme delivers hundreds of one-to-one online meetings that bring together end users, product managers, development engineers and business owners to discuss exactly what they would have discussed at tradeshows like NAB.
Gilbert continued, “Our calendars are filled with online demos, videos and webinars, so the value of our Showtime meetings is connecting with people one-to-one. Mass marketed webinars are useful but nothing beats personal communication. These online meetings are crucial for us to continue listening to our customer’s plans and goals and offer them support and innovative solutions.”
Showtime Pixel Power will run for six weeks.
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