NAB Show: ‘Tonight Show’ Upgrades Graphics to HD with Apella

“The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” an HD veteran dating back nearly a decade, has installed the Apella HDS media server from Video Technics for ingest, management and playback of HD graphics-with-key, the company said. Video Technics is demonstrating its HD workflow at the NAB Show (Booth SU9227).

The solution for the NBC Universal nightly show taped in Burbank includes an Apella HDS with one input and two output multi-rate HD SDI channels, a VT Studio Pro Axio LE nonlinear editor (NLE) and the VT Craft edit plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro, tied together with a fiber-channel SAN capable of supporting real-time access to 10-bit uncompressed video and key.

The new workflow allows the show’s graphics producers to take HD content, edit on the Axio NLE, and export the revised content to the Apella HDS for playout to air with key. Content usually originates from sources using Avid’s DNxHD codec, exported in a QuickTime wrapper, edited with Premiere Pro CS3 or AfterEffects on the Matrox Axio, and then natively exported to the Apella for playout using the VT Craft edit plug-in. The Apella HDS supports multiple formats and native codecs, and has been certified by SAN Solutions for data throughput as high as uncompressed 4:2:2:4 within its storage infrastructures.

Jay Leno’s program had used a Matrox DigiSuite product for many years, and the Apella HDS is compatible with the show’s library of SD video clips. “The Tonight Show” was the first commercial network regular series to air in HD, starting in 1998.