Vizrt Gives Broadcasters Tools for a Seamless Transition to 4K Production

This new workflow ensures that users are able to handle 4K live video and graphics quickly, easily and effectively while still delivering the highest-standard of creative storytelling. By providing a one-box system of 4K-enabled elements with its Viz Engine, Vizrt is able to reduce the amount of equipment needed for production and limit the cost of upgrading each individual piece of existing equipment to be 4K ready.

4K video content is managed in Viz One, the fastest and most scalable media asset management (MAM) system available. 4K graphics and video is fully integrated for newsrooms, sports, weather, promotions, and played live on-air using Viz Engine, the powerful real-time rendering engine. The integration of management with Viz One and real-time rendering and playback from Viz Engine showcases the next logical step from an HD to 4K workflow.

Able to handle all standard 4K formats, Viz Engine is the first to be integrated with Matrox’s new X.mio3 graphics card. This half-length PCI express card provides multi channel SDI I/O with hardware based processing. As a result the 4K Viz Engine is equipped with 12 reconfigurable I/Os and computer-intensive processes are accelerated by the multi-channel processing. While operations like motion-adaptive de-interlacing, up/down/cross scaling and mixing/compositing operations are controlled by the graphics card itself, Viz Engine is given more processing power. This allows Viz Engine to power the workflow effectively, managing 4K content with low-latency and high output. Vizrt will preview the use of the X.mio3 card in the Video Playout demo lounge at NAB 2015.

The processing power behind the new workflow is supplied by the recently announced NVIDIA Quadro® M6000 graphics card. The M6000 is the most powerful professional graphics card with advanced NVIDIA Maxwell™ GPU architecture to conquer challenging graphics workloads and power interactive, photorealistic visualization. The M6000 allows the workflow to quickly output higher resolution content for displays and video walls in both 4K and 8K. It allows fast interactive performance with Vizrt’s solutions by using the processor’s 12GB of onboard graphics memory.

“The idea behind this workflow is simple. We’re bringing the ease of set-up and usability Vizrt users are comfortable with and enabling it for 4K,” said Gerhard Lang, chief engineering officer, Vizrt. “Until now, 4K has been complicated. What we want to do is make future workflows free of complications and allow broadcasters to creatively tell their stories without having to worry about technical problems.”

Donald Sievewright, sales director, video products, EMEA at Matrox, said, “This project highlights that while the industry is asking for new 4K workflows, it doesn’t mean we need to reinvent the wheel to provide them. We’re working with partners like Vizrt to produce solutions which upgrade the HD workflows already in place and give them added power. It’s this that will make the transition to 4K as seamless as possible. The inclusion of our X.mio3 in this workflow means we’re able to be an integral part of this important step forward.”

“The NVIDIA Quadro M6000 is the most powerful GPU on the planet and Vizrt uses its capabilities in an incredibly innovative way. With all the talk that’s surrounded 4K over recent years, customers will be delighted to finally see such a practical installation of what has previously been a theoretical workflow,” said Greg Estes, vice president, enterprise marketing, NVIDIA. 

The brand new 4K-enabled workflow will be showcased on the Vizrt booth (SL2417) during NAB 2015.