Conan takes to the night with Grass Valley and friends
December 14, 2010
NEP Broadcasting, a provider of state-of-the-art mobile and fixed broadcast facilities, has installed multiple Grass Valley K2 media servers for TBS’s “Conan.” Three K2 Summit production clients running ChannelFlex™, three K2 Dyno™ Replay Controllers on a K2 production SAN, a K2 Dyno Production Assistant, and a 180×256 Trinix NXT router were recently installed in the new production studio built on Stage 15 on the Warner Bros. Studios lot in Burbank, Calif. “Conan” debuted on TBS on November 8.
The system provides the capability to iso-record the show’s nine studio cameras and control live replays, with content immediately available for editing on their Apple Final Cut Pro NLEs. Additionally, a K2 Solo media server is used for playback of key/fill material under direct control by the show’s technical director. The Grass Valley multi-format servers will support all types of file-based video and audio production for “Conan.”
“Whether it’s for live production or in-studio environments, we’ve found Grass Valley’s technology to be the most reliable and cost effective for our clients,” said George Hoover, Chief Technology Officer for NEP Broadcasting.
Key Code Media, a west coast-based systems integrator, was responsible for the design and implementation of all post production systems for this project (K2 SAN, Final Cut integration, and graphics). Key Code Media also supplied the 96 TB K2 SAN storage, K2 BaseCamp Express, and Apple Final Cut and graphic workstations, networking them together with the K2 Summits, K2 Solo media servers, K2 Dyno Replay Controllers, and K2 Dyno Production using a 4 Gb Fibre Channel SAN infrastructure. All post systems are real-time with production while the edit-in-place functions allows the “Conan” producers to ready segments for air as they are being recorded.
“The production team at ‘Conan’ is just the latest to discover and benefit from the K2 family of media server solution,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “By using this tightly integrated system, ‘Conan’ enjoys the most efficient file-based production and post production workflow available.”
NEP Supershooters, a long time Grass Valley customer, and as announced recently, has also ordered three Kayenne™ Video Production Center production switchers, one each for their SS29 production truck, the updated SS21, and one yet to be named “Super” truck.