Wed 18th Nov, 2009
New and aggressively priced, state-of-the-art HD/SD four-channel production server with superior image quality is server of choice for live, on-air playback of graphics, animations and interstitials
MENLO PARK, California — Oct. 16, 2009 — Abekas, Incorporated announced the delivery of two additional Mira digital video production servers to Turner Studios in Atlanta, Georgia; this new delivery adds to the two Mira servers already installed at Turner Studios in October, 2008. These two original Mira servers were installed in the studio hosting the National Basketball Association’s “NBA TV”, which is the league’s 24-hour digital television network.
“The two new Mira servers will be installed for general use in our HD production zone, and will be shared primarily between NBA on TNT and MLB (Major League Baseball) on TBS—as well as seeing action for a variety of other productions,” said Peter Fredlund, Director of Studio Technical Operations at Turner Studios in Atlanta.
On the NBA TV set, the two Mira servers feed all animated graphics, bumpers and interstitial video into several large-screen flat-panel video monitors—which form an integral part of the production set used for NBA TV’s live studio coverage of NBA basketball games. “From a production design point of view, you want to zoom into one of those monitors and then transition that image to air,” Junaid Sheikh, president and CEO of Abekas explains. “That’s where you need a proper broadcast-quality gen-locking server to feed both your plasmas and your live production switcher.”
Mira is designed for use in demanding live television broadcast applications in which superior image quality, high reliability and ease of use are of critical importance. Mira’s primary target market segments are for ingest and replay of animated graphics transitions using video, key and audio; live sports slow motion instant replay; and the above-mentioned application to feed stylized video into “on-set” plasma monitors.
“The ability to directly import practically any file type has made the workflow process much faster,” said Mr. Fredlund of Turner Studios, “and controlling each channel of Mira directly from the switcher allows for more complicated effects in the on-set monitors.”
For applications that are extremely audio intensive, Mira offers up to eight AES and 16 embedded tracks of audio per video channel—for a total of up to 64 embedded audio tracks. All digital audio in Mira is recorded with absolutely no compression, ensuring the highest level of aural fidelity with enough tracks to easily support surround sound and multi-lingual productions.
With its very aggressive pricing, the Mira solution for this HD graphics animation playback application is priced at a fraction of the cost for the most popular competing server. And Mira provides superior image quality, a much more reliable platform with RAID-6 parity protection—allowing up to two disk failures without affecting operations—with hot-swap media disk drives, dual-redundant hot-swap power supply modules and redundant hot-swap fans. To top it all off, Mira is housed inside a very compact and robust chassis, measuring just three rack units (3RU) in height.
About Mira
Combining state-of-the-art video/audio processing hardware with the latest RAID.6 disk drive technology, Mira has an extremely competitive price point and is available in three storage capacities: 15-, 30- and 60-hours of recording time for HD digital video, key, audio and timecode—all housed inside a compact 3RU chassis. When recording in SD, the three storage capacities are 32-, 41- and 82-hours. Ultra high-quality JPEG-2000 (J2K) wavelet compression technology with bit rates up to 200Mb/s is used to record the 10-bit HD digital video; or up to 175Mb/s for SD digital video. There are ten compression presets to dial down the bit-rate from 200M/b down to 75Mb/s for HD; and from 175Mb/s down to 25Mb/s for SD.
Access to the RAID.6 media disk drive array is conveniently provided at the front of the machine, with the RAID.6 parity protection allowing up to two disk drive failures at the same time—without any interruption to user operations. Simple and fast “hot-swap” media disk drive exchange is achieved without the use of any hand tools, with provision for a stand-by “hot spare” disk drive with automatic swap and parity rebuild in cases of media disk drive failure.
The rich feature set of Mira includes: a high-speed graphics file import utility which imports QuickTime MOV files that include RGB, alpha and audio to create video+key+audio animation clips; four RS422 serial control ports with Sony, Louth VDCP and Odetics protocols (providing precise control from third-party controllers, including those from Sony, Thomson Grass Valley, Lance Design™ and DNF Controls™, to name just a few); eight tracks of embedded uncompressed digital audio with 24-bit resolution/48kHz sampling (with optional 16-track digital audio available); LTC & VANC timecode record and playback; a unique graphical user interface with integrated video/audio/timecode displays; a built-in multi-paned quad viewer on 1.5Gb/s HD-SDI for live video/audio/timecode “video wall” monitoring; and highly reactive transport controls with instant response.
As a standard feature, Mira can record or playback one or two sets of video, key, audio and timecode (VKAT) within a single operation under a single clip identity. VKAT storage capability dramatically streamlines many production and post applications and greatly simplifies media management. 2X and 3X Super Slow Motion recording and replay capability is available as an optional feature. Mira hardware can be reconfigured by the user to record and play simultaneously using the shared storage, with any combination of the four video streams. These features, along with the aforementioned feature set, provides a powerful HD and SD recording platform for use in live, on-air broadcasting environments.
About Abekas
Abekas, Incorporated (www.abekas.com) is a privately-held company headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Abekas designs, manufactures, sells, and supports a complete line of digital video/audio delay devices, video disk recorders and servers, digital special effects and editing tools for use in the worldwide professional television marketplace — encompassing the production, post production, broadcasting and computer video markets.
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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