The dream of Ray Baldock, and his colleagues at Tektronix, is to offer an increasingly faster, better and cheaper digital server. For the current director of product marketing, the challenge is clear: "whoever does not make the digital transition, is out of business."
Therefore, Tektronix opened the year 99 with an early proposal of novelties for NAB, which covers the fundamental fields of this transition from the beginning: revolutionize the quality of the image. Consequently, it offers flexible solutions for digital connectivity in audio, video, monitoring, testing and measurement of video, until completing the panorama with its high-definition and interactivity equipment.
One of the keys in the permanent work of developing these solutions is that it is an effort that involves numerous industries in, for example, more than ten applications that are coordinated for the performance of their Profile servers, or in the strategic alliances that Tektronix develops with houses such as Avid, Mitsubishi or Panasonic.
By working on servers, network content sharing platforms, MPEG-2 analyzers and image quality meters, including HDTV generators and monitors, among other products, Tektronix is placed at the most strategic points of the transition.
And it does so with promises as attractive as faster than tape, full connectivity, flexibility for new applications and, above all, powerful, but simple to handle interfaces.
As these goals are achieved, Tektronix ensures its expansion in all fields from production to transmission, and not only in professional fields. However, it is clear that the new generation of Grass Valley products will be marked by the notion of the television future that Tektronix is building from now on.
According to Larry Neitling, vice president and general manager of products at Grass Valley, it's very clear what the customer doesn't want: changes in the appearance and sensitivity of the equipment; reduction in reliability or service.
Therefore, they have proposed to work to meet the expectations of users in some fundamental aspects: lower prices; adequacy to DTV; increasing efficiency; compact size; lower power requirements, more capacity and interoperability. This makes Tektronix's idea of "creating the future of television" more credible, then.
News Production with Profile Servers
Avid and Tektronix present at NAB'99 a new solution for news production in fully digital environments: The NewsCutter DV system, a Windows NT-based NLE operated on a Profile network.
The novelty makes the idea of the newsroom equipped with multiple workstations that share the storage of material transparently a reality. The product integrates Avid's powerful interface with a DV-encoded material storage and distribution system based on Profile PDR400 discs.
The design of a native DV system allows to obtain a level of quality perfectly suitable for news operations, simplifies the implementation of connectivity solutions and facilitates the use of material originated in analog formats.
On the other hand, being a solution with centralized storage, the eventual migration to an SDTV transmission environment is greatly facilitated: It may actually be enough to place a transcoder on an output of the server, just before the transmission chain.
NewsCutter DV stations integrate with Profile servers transparently to the user over Fibre Channel connections. The network bandwidth allows the servers of the news network to be used directly as a playback system, although users have the option of integrating their newsroom into a larger network, which uses Profile systems to fully automate the operations of a station.
