NEWS
in brief
Grass Valley Digital News
Production Powers TV9
TV9, the 24-hour news channel serving
the Andhra Pradesh province of India, has
recently upgraded its production facilities
to supercharge its file-based workflow.
The station, based in Hyderabad, had used
Grass Valley™ Profile® servers from its
launch in 2004. Now it uses Grass Valley K2
media servers to support its editing and
playout functions. The main news studio
includes a Grass Valley Kayak™ production
switcher for a polished output. Other
programs from is TV9 are produced using
the Grass Valley Indigo™ AV Mixer, which
combines an audio-follow-video mixer
with production switching.
endemol secures exclusive
with seinfeld and rakieten
Endemol, a world leader in entertainment
programming, has secured an exclusive
international distribution deal with Jerry
Seinfeld and his partner Ellen Rakieten
(The Oprah Winfrey Show) for their newly
created comedy-reality format The Mar-
riage Ref.
Endemol will be the exclusive dis-
tributor of the format across all platforms
outside of the USA and will produce local
versions of the show around the world.
Tom Toumazis, chief commercial officer
at Endemol Group said: “We are thrilled
to have the opportunity to work with a
worldwide legend like Seinfeld and with
Rakieten’s experience behind it, it has all
the makings of a global smash hit. “
NDTV Lumiere plans to raise
$7 million
Alliance Lumière Ltd, which operates under
the NDTV Lumière brand, plans to raise
$7 million as it aims to widen its world
cinema content and step up the presence
of its television channel.
The company, a joint venture between
NDTV Imagine, Manmohan Shetty and
Sunil Doshi, is in talks with private
equity investors.
10 juLY 2009|DIGITAL STUDIO
08-14_DS_JULY09_News.indd 10
Autodesk announces Lustre
Super user tour 2009
At the recent Autodesk Lustre Super tre was easy for me, except for the colour
user tour 2009 works of two interna- grading part of it. Lustre allows me to use
tional colourists was showcased and a lot of creative tools and the changes are
Autodesk announced the launch of seen in real time. So you can play around
the Lustre 2009’s extension and Flare. a bit more with this software. Using this, it
On the tour were Olivier Fontenay, was easy to leverage certain parts of the
senior colourist from EFILM Australia, film because the filmmakers were creat-
the man behind the Oscar nominated ing stuff on the TST monitors. It helped
Olivier Fontaney
Australia and Sebastin Goh, Lustre with the balancing of the pictures.”
colourist from CinePost production Fontane told Digital Studio, “Because I
and the person behind Waltz with come from a lab grading background, I
Bashir, the first animated film to can use extremely simple tools. With Lus-
be nominated for an Oscar as Best tre there are no real boundaries for your
foreign film. imagination. If I imagine something to be
Pankaj Kedia, regional manager, like that, then I can make it happen. In ad-
Advanced Systems-China, India dition, I can try things and the results will
and South East Asia said: “The main Pankaj Kedia be right in front of me in real time. This is
purpose of these Lustre Super Tours a great advantage. The interactivity with
is to showcase some of our leading the software is much better and you can
users; top colourists from across the be much more creative.”
world and show case some of the “India is a very Smoke dominated mar-
award winning projects that they ket as many people in the industry come
have worked on using Lustre.” from the editing background,”said Kedia
Speaking to Digital Studio, Goh but added that the transition had begun
said: “I have worked on Flame before as Smoke artists were involved in colour
and the transition from Flame to Lus- Sebastian Goh corrections too.
Broadcast Asia generates serious leads for participants
Sharing their experiences with Digital Studio, the Indian participants of the Broadcast Asia ‘09 (BA)
show said that the show was all about quality rather than quantity.
“Just like all other broadcast exhibitions, BA also witnessed lower footfalls. Even though the walk-ins
were lesser, the quality of the visitors was upbeat. In fact, it gave us good time to discuss business
with potential clients and partners and we could really accelerate through the sales cycle towards
closure of a few important deals, said Anshul Gupta, brand manager, WASP3D, Beehive Systems.
There was a general feeling that the show was more focused than previous years, while a num-
ber of exhibitors argued that the event attracted more buying customers than before. According to
Sanjay Duda, sr. VP marketing, Essel Shyam Technologies Ltd., the show was well attended in terms of
exhibitors. “The percentage of serious visitors was high. “
Anirudh Prabhakaran, exec. director & president- South Asia, 3i Infotech Ltd. said: “The response to
our launch of media and broadcast solutions at BA was well received and we had very good footfalls
at our stall. Most visitors were serious buyers who were looking at actually buying and implementing
broadcast solutions in the near future. It also gave us an ideal platform to form business alliances with
major vendors and service providers.”
Speaking on the emerging trends it was felt that MPEG-4 is set to boom in the market.
www.digitalstudioindia.in
7/1/2009 10:32:47 AM