Earlier this year, Ken Pyle at Viodi LLC, contacted us about what equipment he could use to switch and record multiple video sources and computer sources for a setup he was creating for Screenplay Magazines Media and Innovations Summit (at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles) in September of this year.
Viodi LLC helps independent telecommunication companies to acquire/produce content for their various needs, and this inquiry was for a special demonstration to be produced with OpenTV.
OpenTV specializes in services and end-to-end solutions enabling intuitive and personalized viewing experiences for consumers of television content worldwide, so it was important that the equipment they had could pull off the interactivity.
They were producing a presentation for the summit that would demonstrate how television broadcasts could implement real- time interactivity with an audience. The idea was to allow for the summit audience to vote and state opinions on what the panelists were discussing using smart phones, text messages, tablets or lap-tops, and broadcast all of it live.
At first Ken thought he needed just a few elements to enhance his set up, but after reviewing the equipment configuration map that he sent us, we suggested the HS-2000. It would give him the most flexibility for the production, since content from the multiple computers and HD sources were essential.
The Interactive Presentation
Ken also needed to put interactive crawls on the output of the switcher, and was concerned about bleed through of the images when the video was sent for output, so he also asked if the HS-2000 could key. Bleed through would be especially distracting for what they wanted to do.
The plan was to have questions and answers appear in the text-crawl, along with illustrative images and data. All this information would be fed to the switcher from the computer with the OpenTV application generation software.
Fortunately, the HS-2000 has a Luma-key feature that Ken applied to the source input, and there was no bleed on the footage that was sent to broadcast – it was a perfect fit.
Ken had this to say about setting up our products with the rest of his equipment:
“The equipment was simple to use; I figured it out without any training and with a minimal amount of having to reference a manual. Datavideo makes the various accessories needed to feed the HS-2000, including devices like the HDMI to HD-SDI converters, and HD-SDI was useful for making it easy to accomplish long cable runs between an inexpensive camera and the mixer, via low-cost 75 Ohm coaxial cables.”
Here is a list of what Ken used, click for more info:
DAC 9 -HDMI to HD/SD-SDI converter
DAC 8 – HD/SD-SDI to HMDI converter
TLM -700HD – 7in HD Field Monitor
For more info about all of these products as well as the HS-2000, please visit:
http://www.datavideo.us, or click on the product name above to go directly to the product page!
To see the interactive footage created with the HS-2000 please visit the following link:
http://www.viodi.tv/2010/10/01/itv-opentv/
To see a video of Ken Pyle’s overview on the HS-2000, please visit:
http://www.viodi.tv/2010/09/25/truly-portable-production/