Grass Valley Touts New Gear And Growth

A year after releasing its Stratus media workflow platform at 2011’s NAB Show, Grass Valley’s integration of ingest, application asset management, editing and playout applications has expanded to about 20 sites, according to Ed Casaccia, the company’s senior marketing director of worldwide content systems.

Among those clients with news operations are Nextstar Broadcasting Group; NBC-owned KNSD San Diego; Media General’s WSPA Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C.-Asheville, N.C.; and LIN’s WTHI Terre Haute, Ind.

Grass Valley also shared new enhancements to its K2 Summit 3G production server that doubles the capability for encoding, decoding, compressing, decompressing and effects. “It all happens in software, and since it all happens in software it increases our agility,” Casaccia said at Grass Valley’s NAB 2012 presentation on Saturday.

Its Edius editing software includes a new mask tool that allows secondary color corrections and other tweaks like 10-bit editing support.

On the camera end, a twin base station that supports both triax and fiber was introduced last fall, as well as a box to convert a triax camera into a fiber base station. New at NAB, it has conversion capabilities that also work the other way around, said Klaus Weber, director of product marketing for camera products.

Grass Valley also reinforced the integrated capabilities of its K2 Edge playout system, based on technology platforms developed by PubliTronic, a Dutch company Grass Valley acquired last fall.

Saturday’s event was the cherry on top of nine Grass Valley announcements that day, including news that WPSD Paducah, Ky., a Paxton Media-owned NBC affiliate, had migrated its productions to Ignite, Grass Valley’s news production automation system. 

For all that’s going on at NAB 2012, click here.