Several companies offering key utility tools and applications software for newsgathering and production workflows announced their support of the Grass Valley Infinity Series at NAB, with Avid and HP at the top of the list.
The development effort includes Avid’s participation in the Grass Valley Open Alliance Partner (OAP) initiative, which supports new, more open and more flexible approaches to newsgathering and field production. By participating in the OAP initiative, Avid plans to work with Grass Valley to create a tightly integrated workflow between the Infinity Series products and Avid editing systems. This integration means that broadcasters and video professionals can look forward to using the Infinity series of products with Avid’s editing kit in the near future.
HP, meanwhile, will certify Grass Valley’s off-the-shelf, removable REV PRO drives as an option to its workstations and reference the REV PRO drives for its OEM partners. The REV PRO devices can be built into workstation products or made available as external drive accessories. This will allow customers, such as HP OEM partners, to purchase HP workstations designed for desktop video applications with REV PRO built in – allowing them to benefit from the power and versatility of REV PRO for desktop applications. It will also ready the workstation for supporting workflows featuring the Infinity Series.
Other companies climbing on board the OAP scheme include CineForm, MediaConcept, MOG Solutions, and Telestream, who bring their respective fields of expertise – in high-performance plug-in accelerators, advanced codecs, MXF wrappers, and universal transcoding tools – to the project.
And lastly for Infinity from NAB, SanDisk Corporation announced that flash memory CompactFlash cards, which it originally invented, will be used in the new camcorder. The camcorder has slots for two CompactFlash cards (currently topping out at a 8GB max), making it the first camcorder introduced in the broadcast industry that uses non-proprietary, removable, solid-state flash memory cards as recording and playback media.
