NAB Show 2024: Grass Valley showcases innovations

Grass Valley, a leader in live production solutions, is pleased to announce continued growth and groundbreaking innovations at NAB Show 2024, building on the momentum of its achievements since IBC 2023. In the span of just over six months, Grass Valley has realized its growth objectives, fuelled by a strategic refinancing initiative, a continued worldwide recruitment drive, the rising adoption of its AMPP SaaS platform by leading media operators, and a growing network of GV Alliance Members.

Grass Valley has recently completed a strategic refinancing of $220 million with Morgan Stanley, positioning the company for accelerated growth and innovation. This financial milestone underscores Grass Valley’s robust market position and its commitment to leading the media technology industry forward.

The company’s talent acquisition efforts continue worldwide, successfully filling over 400 positions in the last 24 months, with further growth commitment through 2024, focused on strategic hardware and software development, including leading modular infrastructure and routing solutions to be announced later in the year.

Grass Valley’s AMPP SaaS platform has seen continued accelerated growth, highlighting the industry’s ongoing shift towards flexible, scalable, and efficient software-defined workflows. Customers such as NVP Italy, the Global Leadership Summit (GLS), and the G20 Summit in India, have showcased how customers can leverage the solutions offered by the GV Media Universe, to drive down operational costs and increase revenue, with innovative approaches to media production.

The GV Alliance continues to grow with over 90 partners from acquisition to distribution. GV AMPP’s open ecosystem approach ensures customers can continue to select best of breed solutions not only from Grass Valley but from traditionally competing solutions, on a single common platform, reducing integration effort and providing users a single comprehensive user experience. Grass Valley will showcase a selection of Alliance partners at NAB Show, including newly integrated solutions from Skaarhoj and Reactoo.

New Product Enhancements Unveiled at NAB Show 2024

On booth C2308, Grass Valley will present a wide array of product updates and innovations across the media production landscape, emphasizing its dedication to advancing both hardware and software technologies.

Camera Solutions
It all starts with image capture. Grass Valley’s cameras deliver superb image quality along with unrivalled connectivity to accelerate workflows. Upgraded features for the LDX 100 series cameras include:

• New integrated LUT processing ensures optimal HDR/SDR signal quality directly from the camera head and base station, reducing the need for external converters.
• Innovative high-speed shooting capabilities, supported in both NativeIP and XCU base station operations, that allow for 6x 1080p shooting with native UHD resolution of the live signal output.
• Exciting new camera product releases focused on remote and wireless workflows, to be announced during the show!

Live Production Solutions
Grass Valley will showcase a new generation of IP I/O boards for its K-Frame XP series switchers, supporting up to 100Gbe connectivity of native JPEG XS directly to the switcher per board, without the need for external gear boxing, plus extended buffers to further support non-synchronized sources.

Video processing within the K-Frame XP has also been upgraded to include custom 3D LUT translation for color mapping of HDR and SDR signals to assist productions in handling the demand for an ever-increasing mixed-format productions.

Another introduction will be the new Clipstore II to the Grass Valley K-Frame product line, delivering up to 4-channels of playback and record, up to UHD 4K 2160P as either SDI or ST2110.

As flexibility and agility become more important than ever for live production workflows and teams, alongside K-Frame, Grass Valley will demonstrate its new modular production switcher solution, Maverik X. Available to run on local, hybrid or cloud compute, Maverik X is the ultimate flexible production switcher, supporting combined uncompressed and compressed inputs and outputs, with full 10bit UHD HDR workflows, automatic up/down/cross conversion and HDR LUT mapping, and controlled via browser, hardware panel or third parties. And if that wasn’t enough, it can also include multiviewers, audio mixing, graphics, replay and more! This is the most flexible production switcher on the market!

Grass Valley has also upgraded LiveTouch X, the first replay solution that allows creatives to collaborate on live video production from anywhere in the connected world. In addition to supporting 16+ record trains per instance, potentially across multiple compute, it now offers enhanced support for 2, 3, 6, and more super slow-motion plus an enhanced user experience with per user camera grouping and playlist extensions.

Infrastructure Solutions

The latest upgrades it has made to its hardware and SaaS infrastructure products will be shown, including:

• GV Orbit extends its hybrid IP and SDI routing orchestration capabilities with AMPP integration for a unified control and monitoring experience across both ground and hybrid workflows. Not only can GV Orbit customers benefit from monitoring AMPP services from within their Orbit client, but connected AMPP users can now orchestrate and take routes from AMPP client interfaces. Now users can bridge the divide and support de-centralized routing topologies for combinations of SDI, ST2110, cloud and ground to cloud workflows, in addition to routing within blocks of AMPP and AMPP Grid Compute.
• MV-1200 Series Multiviewers, with new native 12G-SDI Standalone or Modular options that support up to 32×4 inputs and outputs in the standalone version and up to 144×16 in the modular version. The MV-1200 offers excellent picture quality and HDR support with an exceptionally good price-performance ratio.
• The KudosPro Framerate Converter, providing high-quality single, dual, and quad channel formats and motion compensated framerate conversion in a single rack unit, now offers an additional ST2110 option with dual 25G SFP+ connectivity.
• The XIP-3911-IO, a next generation SDI/IP gateway application on flexible XIP modular infrastructure, now supports an 8-channel SDI/IP ST2110 gateway application in addition to the multiple applications available for up-, down- and cross-conversion, HDR/SDR and audio processing, and JPEG XS encoding/decoding.
• AMPP Local, delivers all the benefits of AMPP orchestration on local compute, allowing AMPP to be used without a 24/7 internet connection. AMPP Local provides all the functionality of the core platform with additional tolerance for areas of limited or disrupted network environments.
• AMPP Grid, maximizes processing potential by supporting the combining of AMPP edge nodes to scale resource capacity and deliver additional fault tolerance with automated workload respawn on node failure.

Content Production Solutions
Upgrades to Grass Valley’s automated production control and next-generation asset management include two products:

Ignite sets the industry standard for the automated production control of scripted and unscripted productions with versatile toolsets for “changes on the fly”, including persistent templates, unlimited instant-event recall, capacitive sensing audio control and MOS object filtering. Ignite now has expanded production control with AMPP, including AMPP macro creation and control, the K-Frame CS X application, and Densité X Clip Player HD.

Framelight X is the next-generation SaaS-based federated asset management for globally distributed, rapidly deployable news and sports production workflows. It enables remote browser-based control of an asset within seconds of a live shot. This rapid content sharing increases yield per asset while eliminating duplication of effort. Its significantly enhanced features include new AI image tagging support, and upgrades to the MOS clip list player, editor, renderer and improvements to subtitle support and scheduling.

Playout Solutions
Grass Valley’s flexible, scalable, cloud-first playout solutions suit all media distribution needs. NAB Show visitors can view the enhancements to two products and one product introduction.

Playout X is a distributed playout solution for thematic and reactive live production playout. It now has an all-new architecture that delivers significantly improved performance, including new Linux hosting options (reducing compute hosting by 40%) and new captioning features for multilingual closed or open captions or subtitles and DVB bitmap subtitles, as well as video/audio descriptions and simple delay channels.

Grass Valley’s showcase at NAB Show 2024 reaffirms its leadership in transitioning to software-based solutions while continuing to innovate in hardware products, meeting the evolving needs of the media industry.

To view these exciting new products and upgrades, Grass Valley invites all show attendees to visit booth C2308 and discuss with our experts how GV solutions can meet tomorrow’s production demands.
BCS Bureau