Anystream announced a grid-scalable, file-based solution for converting Avid DNxHD content to Grass Valley, Omneon and Pinnacle MPEG-2 HD formats. Agility Play-to-Air for Avid DNxHD dramatically accelerates the transfer of finished Avid DNxHD content to playout servers and enables programmers to spend more time on content development. At IBC2006, Anystream demonstrated a six-blade server that, according to the company, moved content twice as fast as current real-time, hardware-based streaming transfers.
The Avid DNxHD codec delivers HD files with the image quality of 8-and 10-bit uncompressed HD media, but at the bandwidth of SD files. Most broadcasters rely on play-to-air servers based on MPEG-2 formats and, in turn, rely upon hardware-based, real-time streaming workflows to transfer finished Avid DNxHD files into those servers.
Instead of spending a minute of streaming for each minute of content, broadcasters can exploit the grid-scalable nature of the Agility Play-to-Air for Avid DNxHD solution and tailor the size of the grid processor to achieve the necessary throughput rates needed to support production.
Until now, replacing the real-time streaming workflow with file-based software converters has been impractical because of the computationally intensive nature of the transcoding task. Agility Play-to-Air for Avid DNxHD organizes multiple computers into a grid processor to radically improve the speed at which content can be readied for playout. This enables broadcasters to implement tapeless workflows for HD production.
For more information, visit www.anystream.com.
