New Equipment - March 2009

Enhancing What's On Screen

The Kramer Switcher & Canon HD Camera (click image to enlarge)Video screens and projection play an ever-increasing role as part of the set for Feature Stages, Presentations and other live events.

We are always looking at better ways to handle the myriad range of video sources - including digital video, PowerPoint slides, DVD sources and live camera images.  It's not uncommon at an event that we need to take screen material from a mixture of our own video resources and mix it with video content from our client's laptops.

Switching Video

We have now invested in a Kramer VP-727 In-CTRL^TM Dual Scaler Seamless Switcher and this allows us to take a wide variety of video sources in whatever standards, scale the images and switch between them using a variety of transitions.  It effectively has two channels, one for preview and the other for the programme output.  The Dual scalers enable us to do "live" seamless transitions from one source to another.

Transitions include cut and fade, plus numerous other effects, with multiple variations and speeds.  The unit also allows us to insert a video source into a computer graphics source and vice versa using Picture-in-Picture Technology.  This means we can combine graphics into a moving background.

We can output video in a wide range of formats and sizes - including High Definition and Widescreen.

HD Video Camera

With this in mind, we have also purchased a Canon XH A1 High Definition video camera.  This is a compact, yet high-spec camera enabling us to provide better live-camera coverage at events.