Orad’s brand new Portal Media Centre promises to enable a wide variety of media types to be consolidated entirely in a 3D environment, allowing live video feeds, clips, stills, 3D graphics, text and audio to be united into a single playout environment, writes Andy Stout.
The company claims that the Portal Media Centre is the only system on the market that empowers television artists to create new, dynamic DVE-like effects using popular video formats, live or recorded, and without tying up the control room. It knows which camera media is on the air and actively associates its assigned textual content. In addition, it harmonises the display of all graphical media so that the production’s brand stands out in an increasingly competitive television marketplace.
For example, one of the most common onscreen presentations in news is the two-box or three-box, which consumes the production switcher, multiple channels of DVE, a character generator and a video server. This one display requires the efforts of many people and is vulnerable to on-air mistakes, mostly due to fast changing conditions in the production or errors in synchronising the individual devices. The Portal Media Centre streamlines the creation and display of this common presentation by consolidating live video, clips, 3D graphics and audio into a single output that can feed the production switcher.
At its heart is Orad’s HDVG, which features powerful video texture technology capable of mapping video onto any 3D object in the scene in realtime. Up to 12 SD video inputs, 6 HD video inputs, or a mixture of each can be mapped at the same time. This technology is extended to playing open video files in their native resolution and bitrate directly from shared storage. The HDVG also supports 16 channels of embedded audio for live video input and can perform mixing or cross fades with video clips and .wav files.
