Grass Valley™ is unveiling the latest version (7.0) of its popular Aurora™ Digital Production platform, which brings new efficiencies in speed, media management, and third-party support to an already fully featured platform that streamlines file-based production workflows for the benefit of a wide variety of standard- and high-definition projects.
Grass Valley Digital Production products span the entire content creation lifecycle, from acquisition to production, and playout. They include feed capture, nonlinear editing, browsing, playback, server and storage, and archiving solutions.
At IBC 2009, Grass Valley will showcase the highly integrated Aurora Suite for quick turnaround production, which features the continually improving Aurora Ingest, Aurora Browse, Aurora Edit and Aurora Playout software applications.
“The Grass Valley Aurora Suite is installed at many of the leading station groups in the top five U.S. markets, and at leading news and sports outlets worldwide, because it continues to solve daily production problems and improve their efficiency,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “These highly scalable and integrated applications, which now include even more new features for file-based production, meet the demand among tapeless environments for an efficient way of getting HD content on air quickly.”
Aurora Ingest is a highly configurable ingest solution designed to manage the recording/transfer of material to K2 shared storage from router sources, VTRs, and nonlinear detachable media (Infinity™, P2, XDCAM). Aurora Browse offers scalable content management, desktop editing, and archive-management tools to leverage the repurposing of high-resolution media assets. Aurora Edit provides full-featured, highly customizable nonlinear editing tool for news, sports, and production, supporting HD, SD, or low-definition (LD) material. And finally Aurora Playout is a highly coordinated news playback solution that can automatically create and adjust playlists from a media object server (MOS) protocol-based newsroom computer system.
When the Grass Valley MediaFrame content management module is added to the Aurora system, the Aurora Ingest, Aurora Edit, and Aurora Playout applications will all have access to the same media search and metadata-management tools previously only available within the Aurora Browse solution.
MediaFrame lets users add general and custom metadata and has expanded easily organized results, collections, dynamic keyword marking, and functions similar to the FeedClip™ system. With an expanded results window and dynamically positioned columns, the MediaFrame module lets users choose what metadata is shown in organized clips. Users can customize views using a column picker to show technical, general, or custom metadata when viewing search results.
New! Aurora Ingest 7.0 is highly configurable, ranging from simple and affordable single workstations for small operations to fully networked, high-availability scheduling systems that fit the needs of the largest tapeless production environments running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
With an intuitive interface, the Aurora Ingest system lets users control any number of K2 media server/media client systems and K2 Summit, supporting ingest channels under manual or automatic channel assignment.
For videotape ingest, the Aurora Ingest system can function as a central workstation to control up to eight VTRs at one time; users can also use any number of single VTR workstations to feed the system.
The Aurora Ingest system offers a unique removable-media interface that lets users pull material directly from the REV PRO removable media used by Grass Valley Infinity Series products, as well as Panasonic P2 and Sony XDCAM products.
NEW! Aurora Browse 7.0 provides desktop access to low-resolution media for searching, browsing, editing, logging, sequence trimming, archive storage interactions, and simple content management-and the ability to link changes to that media with the corresponding high-resolution media residing on a playout system.
Supporting the K2 media server/media client, K2 Summit-as well as the Aurora Ingest, Aurora Edit, and Aurora Playout applications-the Aurora Browse system gives users fast, easy access to feeds and centralized and archived media as well as familiar, intuitive editing tools for complete story creation-all from the desktop.
NEW! Aurora Edit 7.0 is the fastest nonlinear production tool available for editing. Whether SD, HD, or LD, it provides a toolset to quickly triage, shape, and transform a media project. And the Aurora Edit LD is based on the same code as full-resolution Aurora editors and includes MediaFrame content management.
Available in workstation-, software-, and laptop-based solutions, the Aurora Edit system uses standard PC and networking technologies and features broad format support for tailoring the platform to any level of production. Not only does the Aurora Edit system eliminate pre-digitizing, but its Realtime Edit™ feature lets users see edits as they’re made-eliminating the need to review the edit.
NEW! Aurora Playout 7.0 offers highly coordinated news playback from the K2 media server/media client system, and K2 Summit. Designed for workflow efficiency and flexibility, it can automatically create and adjust playlists from a media object server (MOS) protocol newsroom computer system. To streamline story creation and increase story accuracy, the Aurora Playout solution makes its playlist available to Aurora Edit system users. A list of stories to be edited is available as a simple pop-up list on an Aurora Edit station.
The Aurora Playout platform is compatible with MOS protocol-compliant NRCS solutions, such as the iNEWS, ENPS, Octopus, and NC Power systems. And using GPI inputs, users can control an Aurora Playout system from a Grass Valley production switcher/vision mixer or other relay-closure type device.
EDIUS with Aurora Plug-ins brings the power of the EDIUS nonlinear editing system to Aurora tapeless production systems. Aurora features, including link-to-playout placeholder and edit-in-place from K2 storage systems, have been added to the full range of EDIUS editing capabilities to create a new level of shared editing for Aurora users.
Pricing and Availability
Pricing for the new version 7.0 applications within the Aurora suite depends on configuration and will be available in December, 2009.