Blackmagic Design today announced that Creative Technology (CT), one of the world’s leading rental and event staging specialists, has equipped its infrastructure engineers with the Blackmagic Video Assist as part of their standard issue onsite testing kits.
CT supplies AV equipment and bespoke staging services to global sporting, corporate, exhibition and entertainment industries. Major recent projects have included events at the Rio Olympics and the UK’s Grand National horse race, as well as AV for international tours for artists such as Mariah Carey and Queen.
The Video Assist field monitor and recorder are used primarily for testing live production workflows, and as a video source at the early stages of rig construction, when other playback sources are not yet set up according to Creative Technology’s director of Integrated Networks, Sid Lobb.
“Previously we had relied on a small stock of test pattern generators and used those in conjunction with a separate field monitor when carrying out signal testing,” Lobb began. “The Video Assist was an ideal replacement, not least because of the price point. It does both tasks, but now our engineers only have to carry a single, battery driven unit on them.”
He continued: “Its form factor, playback, and monitoring features, combined with HDSDI and HDMI connectivity gives us an inexpensive, yet extremely practical piece of hardware for testing and monitoring in the field.” The Video Assist features a full 1920 x 1080 screen, HD recorder, and a down converter for monitoring and recording HD from Ultra HD sources.
Engineers from CT are now utilising the Video Assists at live productions throughout Europe, including a recent brief at a car manufacturing facility in Germany. “Prior to our broadcast team arriving, the installation team was able to prove all of the lines we had set up to feed into our OB truck,” explained Lobb. “However, when the truck arrived, its embedder was malforming the SDI signal. Using the Video Assists, we were able to prove that the system was passing clean video with embedded audio, enabling us to pinpoint the issue far quicker than we would have been able to previously.”
“The Video Assists have quickly become an essential element in our installation builds,” concluded Lobb. “They are well priced and deliver fantastic quality and reliability for our engineers working under tight time constraints onsite.”