AXON and Sweetwater show 52nd GRAMMY® Awards Tribute Segment in 3D

AXON’s, Synapse card GXG160 was used by Sweetwater Digital Productions, a mobile broadcast facilities rental company, to create the 3D tribute segment of the 52nd Annual GRAMMY® Awards broadcasted live on CBS.

Sweetwater, Los Angeles-based, provides video production trucks, custom control room installations, and display technology to entertainment and corporate clients. Sweetwater rents to the producers of television shows, concerts, live special events, corporate shows, meetings, conventions and motion pictures. In order to create the broadcasted anaglyph for the 3D-portion of the event Sweetwater used the Synapse GXG160 card. The GXG160, originally designed for up/down/cross conversion, is a low latency module which has several built-in functions that support 3D stereo production: it supports horizontal and vertical flip on both inputs to flip/rotate images coming from a 3D camera set on a rig with a mirror, it can squeeze the left and right ‘eye’ signal to an anamorphic half horizontal size and combining them into one side-by-side stream, and it has two full-blown colour correctors on-board that combined with the on-board mixer can be used to create any type of anaglyph 3D video Sweetwater also used the GXG160 for the “We are the World” Haiti benefit to create the side-by-side picture for the 3D viewing and screening rooms.

Scott Heames, Sweetwater’s Engineer in Charge explains: We have very high confidence in all the Axon products we use—which is why we chose their products as the backbone of our premiere HD mobile unit named Cobalt. When the challenge of the 3D portion of the 52nd GRAMMYs came up, we had several options to choose from. Ultimately the GXG-160 became the best solution for our needs due to its color imagery, reliability and low-latency. “We are proud that our Synapse module has been chosen for this prestigious event”, comments Peter Schut, AXON’s CTO.” After events in France, Belgium and the UK , this is the 4th live 3D-transmission where our modules are used. Sweetwater has been using our Synapse products for many years and turned to us for help because of our experience with 3D production.”