IT’S NOT LIKE WE’RE ALL GOING TO WAKE UP ONE DAY AND – POOF – EVERYTHING IS NOW IN THE CLOUD
at broadcast solutions innovator, Grass Valley. “There is going to be a transition. People have their existing plants and not everything is for the cloud.” Cronk offers a reminder that content production is made up of creators. A change in technology is potentially also a change in a creator’s toolkit. It would be rare for a team to have all their interfaces and tools suddenly switched and still be able to maintain the same level of quality. “Over the years, lots of great interfaces have been developed,” says Cronk. “Such as production switchers or replay interfaces that technical directors know and love. In the cloud, everything can be HTML5 and interfaces can be completely screen-based, but that doesn’t always make sense.” A classic example is the audio mixer sitting over a huge desk covered in faders and pots. It’s certainly possible – and maybe very logical – to put all that into a screen interface. But the mixing
desk is a sound engineer’s instrument. The physicality of it is a key element of their craft. They’re not going to be able to pull off the same ‘performance’ with a mouse or a touchscreen. With this in mind, Grass Valley is in the process of making its production hardware ‘AMPP-connected.’ GV AMPP (or the Grass Valley Agile Media Processing Platform) is the company’s new SaaS-based cloud offering, which joins the company’s years of broadcast expertise with the power of elastic compute. As companies adopt AMPP for a host of broadcast uses, Grass Valley is working hard to ensure legacy systems and on-premises hardware not only have an extended life cycle, but can be leveraged even more effectively. The first of Grass Valley’s products to be AMPP-connected are its K-Frame panels. The K-Frame production switchers are on board most OB vans in the broadcast industry. Starting this spring, with a simple software upgrade, they will be able to seamlessly integrate with the AMPP platform. “The K-Frame panel is there, but there is no frame behind it. At the back end, it might just be running on a COTS server or a public cloud services – it’s no longer permanently tied to an on-premises frame. You can set up a show in a regular K-Frame, then take that show file, plug it into another panel and cut it using a frame connected to AMPP. It allows you to use what you’re familiar with and the functions you would expect,” explains Cronk.
FRAME OF REFERENCE Grass Valley’s K-Frame production
switchers will be able to integrate with AMPP
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