Grass Valley Group Previews Digital Cinema Technologies At ShoWest 2001

Technology Featured in BARCO, Christie Digital, Digital Projection And JVC Exhibitions At Bally's

5-Mar-01

Putting a public face on its intense, private development efforts, the Grass Valley Group this week is previewing a group of new technologies whose applications range from mastering, playing back, and monitoring the production of digital films and high definition (HD) video presentations. Supporting the work of leading digital cinema projection companies, including BARCO, Christie Digital, Digital Projection, and JVC, the company is making presentations in Las Vegas at the ShoWest movie exhibition industry convention.With four technical EmmyÆ awards to its credit, the Grass Valley Group is a worldwide leader in high quality material. Having pioneered black-and-white television, it is now playing key roles in everything from digital broadcasting to streaming high quality video over the Internet. The demonstrations at ShoWest show how the company has leveraged its core image processing expertise for the digital film and HD presentation markets.""For some time, we have been having substantive conversations with the key contributors in the film and presentation industries, from studios and distributors to exhibitors and projection companies,"" said Beth Bonness, Director, Digital Cinema Business Development, at the Grass Valley Group. ""Because we listened closely, we could engage in a focused development effort to address the needs of these key constituencies.""Today's digital cinema demonstrations centered on a version of the Grass Valley Group's ProfileÆ XP Media Platform tailored specifically for the film industry. Open, flexible, and projector independent, the platform is designed to support industry-standard compression, encryption, watermarking, and fingerprinting technologies. It features a modular, upgradeable design to protect equipment investments and a full complement of redundant components to ensure maximum uptime.Under the hood, the Grass Valley Group's digital cinema platform featured technologies for drag-and-drop mastering and play-out monitoring. As important, company officials demonstrated how the platform can support both digital cinema playback and alternative-media programming - a feature that could, for example, enable a theatre to screen a film in the afternoon and show a live, satellite-based concert in the evening, potentially creating entirely new sources of revenue using the same facilities and equipment.To ensure continuous operation, today's presentations also include a demonstration of the Grass Valley Group's NetCentralô application for pro-active remote monitoring and troubleshooting. NetCentral software can automatically alert a technician at the first sign of trouble via pager, phone, or e-mail, potentially avoiding costly downtime.Profile XP Platform Showcases HDTV, Immersive Marketing UsesThe Grass Valley Group also demonstrated the critical role that the Profile XP Media Platform is playing in both HD broadcasting as well as in the emerging arena of immersive marketing. The HD version of the platform made its on-air debut last fall with the launch of a new HDTV pay-per-view channel by EchoStar Communications Corporation. Since then, it has helped to support PBS's HD coverage of the presidential inauguration of George Walker Bush and was used by KTLA-TV, a Los Angeles-based Tribune Broadcasting station, to broadcast the annual Tournament of Roses Parade in HD.The HD platform was also recently selected by the Enterprise Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) for distributing and playing out high definition video programming in its luxury Network Event Centers, which will be located in malls and city centers nationwide. Free to the public and linked to an e-commerce network, the EBC theatres will serve as centers of commerce where manufacturers and service providers of high-end goods and services (such as ocean cruises, rafting and hiking excursions, and sports cars) can communicate directly with their target consumers in a highly memorable fashion. EBC will enable these companies to tell their stories through digital merchandising that includes a DolbyÆ sound system and pristine, HD images playing out from the Profile XP Media Platform on a 23-foot screen.The Profile XP Media PlatformThe Profile XP Media Platform is part of the Emmy award-winning Profile line, which has more broadcast content stored on it and more units installed than any other server. And it takes only a swap of a board to upgrade a standard-definition Profile XP Media Platform system for high-definition signal processing. The Profile line is also the most open solution, supporting the high quality video standards required for broadcast television and low resolution video required for the Internet.For the latest Grass Valley Group product information, visit www.grassvalleygroup.com.

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