NAB Brings New Products and Enhancements for Ross Video’s XPression

Thursday, April 14^th, 2016 [Ottawa, Ontario, Canada] – For NAB 2016, a number of new products and enhancements are being shown for the Ross XPression line of real-time motion graphics systems, clip servers, workflow tools, and purpose-built software applications.

“We’re excited about what we’re bringing to Las Vegas this year,” said Brian Olson, Director of Marketing Product Management for XPression. “We want to make sure existing XPression customers are constantly getting more value from their purchase and also offer a broader range of products for new customers to fit their varying workflows and use cases.”

XPression Quad continues the development of systems suitable to 4K Production. This graphics system supports up to 4 channels of HD/SD or Quad link 4K outputs with key, and is user configurable for any combination of inputs and outputs. XPression Quad is even capable of running 2 channels of insert graphics, a score bug, and baseband video preview for live sports on a single system. XPression Quad is available either with a full software interface for graphics creation or as a headless graphics engine.

To further support fast and efficient news production workflows, XPression has added new features to its MOS plug-in interface. There are new pull-down menus with lists, check boxes, and radio buttons. Users have the ability to re-size thumbnails and view newsroom computer systems rundowns with thumbnails. The database of the XPression Clips clip server can be visually browsed from the plug-in as well.

To assist in automating graphics production workflows for news and sports, XPression now supports Adobe XMP Metadata. The metadata stored in Adobe files can be used to change text, colors, images, and clips inside of XPression scenes. To enable customized workflows, the XMP metadata works with Visual Logic programming to achieve template automation.

Another design enhancement for XPression is the addition of a Slab primitive that can be skewed at any angle, offers separate front/back faces/bevels/extrusions, and can make a variety of shapes depending on parameter settings. The new primitive eliminates the need to go to a 3D authoring program for basics boxes, slabs, and rectangles.

XPression Tick-it is an automated, multi-channel, multi-zone, multi-function, collaborative workflow server for tickers and informational channels. Now, XPression Tick-it Flow offers the same centralized data aggregation as XPression Tick-it without the direct playout capabilities, and includes elections software. This cost-effective data server permits feeding data to XPression production graphics systems via Datalinq, and even creating feeds for third party graphics devices or websites and mobile. It is also fully upgradable to XPression Tick-it if you want to take those graphics directly to air.

Ross Trackless Studio is a new all-in-one virtual production tool that fits almost any budget. Built on the XPression Real-Time Motion Graphics System with an intuitive purpose-built interface, Trackless Studio leverages years of experience from Ross Video with virtual sets and augmented reality to bring quality virtual sets to even the most basic productions.

Cost-effective virtual productions are made possible with Ross Trackless Studio, as it uses stationary physical cameras instead of robotic camera systems, encoded camera heads/lenses, or optical tracking hardware. Trackless Studio uses the same high-quality virtual sets as tracked implementations to provide incredible results while staying on budget. It even ships with 6 stock virtual sets, with more available on the Ross e-commerce site. Budgets and studio real estate often necessitate a different approach to production. As all camera moves are done virtually, the need for a large studio space is eliminated. Ross Trackless Studio opens up new opportunities for virtual sets.

About Ross Video
Passionate about live production, Ross Video designs, manufactures and delivers dependable technology and services that power exceptional live video productions seen by billions of viewers around the world every day. Ross Video’s goal is to make it easy for customers to create compelling news, weather and sports broadcasts, engaging material for sports stadium screens, legislative assemblies, entertainment shows and rock concerts, and inspiring content for houses of worship.

Relentlessly innovating, Ross Video delivers the world’s widest range of products and services for augmented reality and virtual sets, mobile live-event solutions, real-time motion graphics, robotic camera systems, social-media management, production switchers, routers, infrastructure products, video servers, newsroom systems, terminal equipment and more.

Ross products and services are designed to offer best-in-class system integration and unmatched customer choice by both working together seamlessly and integrating tightly with third-party solutions.

Ross Video has offices around the world, and provides free-for-life telephone support staffed by technical experts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year—even for products bought on eBay. Recognizing the time-critical nature of the broadcast industry, all Ross employees are empowered to provide “whatever it takes” customer service, even down to renting helicopters when necessary to deliver needed parts and service.

Ross Video: The Production Technology Experts.

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Ross Video Media Contact:
Sara Bell
Media Relations Co-ordinator
t. (613) 652-3020
f. (613) 652-4425
e. sbell@rossvideo.com

Ross Video Media Contact – EMEA:
Stuart G. Russell
Marketing Manager, EMEA
t. +44 7827 019494
f. +1 613-652-4425
e. srussell@rossvideo.com

Ross Video Media Contact – Asia Pacific:
Vivian Yu
Marketing & Operations Manager, Asia Pacific
t. +65 9827 3531
f. +1 613-652-4425
e. vyu@rossvideo.com