Grass Valley Upgrades T2 iDDRs Line

Improved recorders offer faster signal processing and support for more formats

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/27/2012 11:41:32 AM

Grass Valley has announced that it is now offering a newly designed and significantly improved T2 family of intelligent digital disk recorders (iDDRs) targeted to the live event, post-production, and video-on-demand applications.

The new T2 line, which includes the T2 Express, T2 Pro and T2 Elite models, offer faster signal processing, large amounts of storage, 2.5-inch HDD or SSD storage drives and offer support for more native file formats and compression codecs, both from Grass Valley and outside vendors.

Those features, the company also notes, should help streamline manual processes and significantly improve a wide variety of file-based workflows.

"T2 has earned a place of prominence in many live event and corporate presentations, where frame accurate timing and very high resolution playback are critical to success," said Charlie Dunn, executive VP of products at Grass Valley. "The new T2s offer just the right amount of features and capability to fit any production and post needs. The team has really worked hard to bring this exciting new series of revolutionary products to market in the form factor our users have asked for."

Both the T2 Express and Pro models provide up to 1 TB (or 14 hours) of full 1080i HD content storage while the T2 Elite model provides up to 600 GB (or 8 hours) of full 1080i HD content storage using SSD.

The models now support such file formats as XDCAM HD422, XDCAM EX HD 35 Mb/s, AVC-Intra 100, GF 100 Mb/s, and AVCHD.

With the improvements, the new T2 models can carry out real-time SD/HD cross-conversion and cross-convert HD formats (between 720p and 1080i) in real-time.