OSLO, Norway—Nevion, a Sony Group Company, is adding up-, down- and cross-conversion (UDC) capabilities to its Virtuoso software-defined media node, the company said today.

The solution provides low-latency, native-IP and high-quality video conversion for live broadcast and media production applications, including remote and distributed production, it said.

The initial release the new UDC function enables conversion between different video formats typically used during production, including HD-to-HD cross conversion, HD-to-UHD up conversion and UHD-to-HD down conversion.

The video processing supports high-quality de-interlacing and interlacing and resolution scaling with built-in legalizer and frame synchronizer with PTP support. This functionality is built for native SMPTE ST 2110-20 IP connectivity with SMPTE ST 2022-7 hitless switching transport protection on dual 25GigE, the company said.

One 1RU Virtuoso can run up to 16 video conversion processes at the same time or combine conversion with other media function capabilities, such as SDI/IP adaptation; MADI and AES3 audio adaptation; audio embedding/de-embedding, processing and mixing; or video encoding and decoding, making the product well-suited for use in server farms, the company said.

“Virtuoso is a very versatile and cost-effective platform that can be used for a variety of live production and distribution applications. UDC is an important addition to Virtuoso’s existing video functionality, offering high-density processing capabilities that will be very attractive in production environments,” said Inge Hillestad, company vice president of product management, Virtuoso.

More information is available on the company’s website.

OSLO, Norway—In what it is saying is the first large-scale application of TICO video compression, virtualized media production systems provider Nevion shared that its software-defined Virtuoso media node was one of the tools used by China’s Media Group (CMG) during its live broadcast of the 70th anniversary celebration for the People’s Republic of China.

For the event, CMG had more than 120 Virtuoso units to broadcast the live 4K footage across China Central Television’s TV stations and websites, as well as 4K movie theaters.

The Virtuoso has a TICO media function that enables encoding and decoding of UHD/4K video for transport over 10GE/IP or 3G-SDI links with a 4:1 compression ratio and latency of a few milliseconds. The Nevion platforms help to ensure TICO encoding and decoding of all 4K/UHD signals from the OB vans, on-site cameras and microwave links in and around Tiananmen Square. Compress signals were transported between two master control rooms, four 4K studios and CCTV’s 4K playout system at different site as 3G-SDI TICO streams over Nevion’s fiber transmitters and receivers.

In addition, 4K PGM signals were encoded by Virtuoso using lightweight TICO compression technology and sent back to LED screens in Tiananmen Square.

The production required three encoding-decoding cycles for each 4K/UHD signal.