CCTV Outfits Field Reporters with Grass Valley Edit Stations

China Central Television (CCTV), the main state-run television broadcaster in China that reaches more than one billion viewers, has begun to outfit its overseas journalists with Grass Valley EDIUS Laptop Edit Stations as part of an upgrade to its electronic newsgathering activities. The new PC-based laptop systems will allow CCTV’s overseas journalists to take advantage of a native file-based workflow in the field that will bring news to air faster and more efficiently.

Headquartered in Beijing, CCTV has ordered 70 EDIUS Laptop Edit Stations. With its HQ codec, the EDIUS Laptop Edit Station offers journalists and producers in the field the ability to perform real-time, mixed-format editing, as well as real-time conversion of different resolutions, frame rates, and aspect ratios, all with a customizable user interface that allows users to work the way they want to.

“Newsgathering organizations around the world are recognizing the value in speed and efficiency of a file-based workflow in the field and are increasingly turning to the EDIUS Laptop Edit Station for its cost-effectiveness and flexibility to handle a number of content creation tasks,” said Jeff Rosica, senior vice president of Grass Valley. “CCTV’s ENG operations will benefit greatly by using the EDIUS Laptop Edit Station and its viewers will benefit from expanded news coverage, with ability to handle a variety of video formats on a single timeline as well.”

Each EDIUS Laptop Edit Station is designed to support the real-time editing of all popular HD and SD formats including HQ, DV, DVCAM, HDV, DVCPRO, MPEG-2, and uncompressed video while also supporting file-based formats such as JPEG 2000, P2, VariCam, XDCAM, and GFCAM. It also provides real-time effects, keyers, transitions, and titles with new GPU FX GPU-accelerated 3D transitions.

The station offers native, full-resolution, real-time editing of multiple layers of AVCHD material. EDIUS 5.5 can edit more than three layers of full resolution, full frame-rate AVCHD in real-time, without any special hardware or expensive GPUs.