Country Music Hall of Fame Chooses NewTek TriCaster

The TriCaster™ portable live production and virtual set system will be used by the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum to record and archive many of its programs for on demand viewing at www.countrymusichalloffame.com.

“Our mission is to identify and preserve the evolving history and traditions of country music, and to educate our audiences, and we strive to be a ‘museum without walls’,” said Kyle Young, museum director. "TriCaster will help us further those efforts, allowing us to deliver our programming on-demand to a worldwide audience.”

“Cultural institutions like the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum are always looking for new ways to curate historical information,” said Philip Nelson, senior vice president, strategic development, NewTek Inc. “These archived performances and interviews can deliver the spontaneity and excitement of music in its purest form, underscoring their importance to society.”

The upcoming Poets and Prophets: Legendary Country Songwriters is the first program that will be recorded, archived and available for on demand viewing. It will feature hit songwriter Matraca Berg, a live performance from Berg and an in-depth interview with the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame honoree.

With TriCaster, anyone can simultaneously produce, live stream, broadcast, project and record a network-style production that can be archived for on-demand viewing. A single operator or small team can produce and stream a live show while switching between as many as six cameras with two DDRs, multi-channel effects and NewTek's proprietary LiveSet™ virtual sets. In addition to being used by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, TriCaster is used by music instrument manufacturers, broadcasters, schools, sports organizations and government agencies and others to

3D Arsenal Sports Content Pack Actually Ships!

Today NewTek announced the release of the 3D Content Pack Volume 1: Sports, a collection of network-style, ready-to-use, customizable animated 3D scenes designed for use with LightWave 3D® and 3D Arsenal™. The NewTek 3D Content Pack, Volume 1: Sports offers nearly 100 dynamic and animated scenes designed for football, baseball, basketball, soccer and hockey productions.

Each sequence contains:

• Program opening and bumper animations for each sport
• Logo treatments for team and player identification with areas to customize with logos and player pictures
• Program title or team logo animations for segment introductions
• Fast-paced bumper and transition animations that include placement for an image or video

“3D Content Pack eliminates a majority of the work and time that it takes to create custom network-style motion graphics” said Rex Olson, vice president, content development, NewTek. “Containing almost 100 fully animated 3D scenes, this is a great addition for any 3D Arsenal or LightWave 3D user to effortlessly create high quality 3D sports motion graphics for live TriCaster productions."

List price of $295 and available from Digital Arts of course - call us for price. I'll post some samples as soon as I get them.



Update:

USA Wrestling to Use TriCaster

USA Wrestling will use NewTek's TriCaster to stream the 2009 USA Wrestling World Team Trials on May 30 and 31 at www.livesportsvideo.com.

From the San Antonio Business Journal

“We are excited to deliver the 2009 World Team Trials to a worldwide audience,” says Rich Bender, executive director of USA Wrestling. “Whether you are a faithful wrestling fan, or a relative or friend of one of the participants, you won’t miss a moment of the live action, thanks to NewTek TriCaster.”

The complete domination of streaming sports be the TriCaster continues.

TriCaster XD300 Reviews

Streaming Media reviews the XD300. Their review is based on the online demo. H/T Jef Kethly

..."from the online demo, it looks like, if not a game-changer, than certainly the system that will keep NewTek in the game for a long time to come."

TriCaster XD300 Live Demo Event

NewTek is hosting a live streaming demo of the upcoming high definition TriCaster XD300 on May 7th. You can sign up to reserve a spot at http://www.newtek.com/demo/. It will blow your mind!



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NAB Picures

Random Pictures

 

  

 

NAB Coolness From NewTek

NAB day one. The whole show seems a little lower key then it has in the past, it's definitely not as crowded. This makes it a little easier to get around and check stuff out. NewTek's booth though was busy all day which was a good sign.

NewTek is featuring three products at this years show: The Tricaster Broadcast, The 3Play and the TriCaster XD300. The XD300 isn't scheduled to ship until fourth quarter so they were calling it a product preview. I'll get to some details in a bit.

Nothing new with the TriCaster Broadcast other than the v 2.5 update that shipped a few weeks ago. NewTek is running the Spring Stream special which gets you with any TriCaster Pro, Studio or Broadcast purchase The Live Set pack, 3D Arsenal and SpeedEDIT plus 1 month of Watershed, Ustream's new corporate streaming service. All this is a $2264 value. The promotion runs through May 27.

3Plays are officially shipping. The 3Play is, in case you didn't know a three input HD/SD instant replay box with a pretty slick workflow. The list price is $21.995 which is a heck of deal as it's easily one third the price of any other three channel HD replay unit. My favorite bit is the interpolated slow motion. No matter how slow you go the video has a nice smooth motion. You'd expect at this price point to see a slide show when you set the speed too slow but not with the 3Play. NewTek's 3Play tag line is "Get In The Game". Now professional level instant replay and slow motion are available at a real world price point.

The TriCaster XD300 is the long awaited HD switcher. It is similar to the current TriCaster Pro in that it has three input channels, CG overlays, live streaming and virtual sets. But every facet has been improved, some on a massive scale. So the XD300 is a lot more than a TriCaster HD

The highlights:
Two independent, sizable, positionable down stream keys. And you can bring these on and off with fancy transitions. Oh and you can use any source with these keys, your no longer limited to titles and pre-recorded clips. I think those un-used joysticks on the LC-11 controller will come in handy here.

Positionable sources in virtual sets. If your camera shot isn't quite positioned or zoomed correctly you can reposition or resize that source right in the LiveSet panel.

Live zooms in LiveSets. Want a tighter shot, no problem just zoom in, you can even do this while the shot is live.

Up stream keys on all inputs. In addition to the down stream keys you can assign an individual key to each input.

Virtual inputs. NewTek has come up with an ingenious way to manage all these virtual sets, upstream keys etc. The switcher has the normal complement of inputs: 3 camera, DDR, Still store, iVGA etc. but it also has five virtual inputs that can be any combination of virtual set with two live sources and an upstream key. This makes it very easy to set up. So with the two down stream keys we're talking five HD sources on screen at once.

Mix HD, SD, 4:3, 16:9 inputs. Output SD, HD and a stream at the same time. Everything is uprezzed or down converted as necessary on the fly. You can also color correct all sources and the SD, HD and stream outputs individually.

The user interface has been carefully thought out so it looks like it's a breeze to use. The XD300 has a full complement of ins and outs including composite, Y/C, component and SDI. It's just a complete category killer, NewTek has redefined what is possible with a portable unit like this. Oh and before I forget it's only $14,995!

This thing is going to be a lot of fun demoing because it's just going to cause jaws to drop, I can't wait to get my hands on one.

I'll get some pictures up ASAP.

Online Demo