Brainstorm America Selects the Grass Valley Infinity

Camcorder for Its Virtual Studio Installations

Las Vegas (National Association of Broadcasters Convention – Booth# SL106) April XX, 2009 – Ensuring the highest quality for its virtual studio installations, systems integration company Brainstorm America is using the Grass Valley™ Infinity™ Digital Media Camcorder (DMC) in tandem with the Brainstorm eStudio real-time 3D engine. Recognizing the camcorder’s power and flexibility, Brainstorm America has incorporated the Infinity into both its production services division and now offers it as a “best-in-class” solution to its virtual studio clients.

Brainstorm America, the North American representative of the Brainstorm Multimedia (Spain) product line (http://brainstorm.es/), has created virtual production environments for a wide variety of clients in the U.S., including AccuWeather and ESPN.

When designing a broadcast-quality virtual set system for many of its clients, Brainstorm is pairing the Infinity camcorder with a Talon remote camera head from RavensClaw, Inc. and an Ultimatte 11 HD/SD image compositing system. Brainstorm eStudio v.11 software processes the incoming data from the Talon and the sensors on the Infinity camera’s lens and sends the rendered image to the Ultimatte to be composited into a final electronically generated studio background image.

Many of Brainstorm America’s customers utilize the Infinity in a similar way but with variations on tracking solutions and lenses. During set up, they are able to fine-tune the Infinity’s wide range of operational features to adjust for any type of production setting or application.

“The Grass Valley Infinity camcorder provides us and our clients with a robust camera solution with sophisticated management of its operational parameters that allows us to adapt to the rigors and requirements of the production environment,” said Paul Lacombe, President at Brainstorm America. “The quality and control of the image for chromakeying is paramount to anything else when it comes to cameras used for virtual sets. The high dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio provided by the Infinity’s CMOS imagers, in combination with the 22-bit digital signal processing of image-management functions, offers users unlimited control to create great-looking chromakeys.”

With virtual studio production, it is also critical to have the ability to tune the system to very fine tolerances. The viewer will notice any offsets in the real and the virtual images. Although they may not be fully aware of what the difference is, the subconscious reaction to this will cause a break in the overall acceptability of the presentation. That’s why the Infinity camcorder’s high-quality image acquisition capability—due to the pristine quality of 2/3-inch, native HD Xensium™ CMOS image sensors—and variable feature set is so important to Brainstorm America.

“Brainstorm America will incorporate the metadata, video, and audio content written in an open, MXF-based wrapper, providing customers with a digital record of their production,” Lacombe said. “USB, network and Bluetooth wireless access available on the Infinity camcorder provides us with multiple options of control to meet or customers requirements.”

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