Matrox Monarch EDGE powers Vizrt remote productions

It's been hard to get two people in a room for any live shows lately. Lucky for us, the new Matrox Monarch EDGE makes it easy with virtual setups! 

The Matrox Monarch EDGE lets Vizrt deliver low latency virtual interviews!

This is an amazing encoder / decorder. Use this with Vizrt's software-defined visual story telling tools and suddenly two people can be in the same room when they're hundreds of miles away from each other. Here, we have Christ Black (Vizrt's Norway Based head of brand and content team) with Gerhard Land (Vizrt's Austria based Chief Technology Officer) sitting together in what seems like the same room. But they aren't. It's done seamlessly through cloud services at two different points. The Monarch EDGE has made this possible, and has become a favorite device among Vizrt staff. 

COVDI-19 has really put a damper on live production simply because traveling is a problem. This technology is a great way to get around this problem and perfect for those producing online shows or school lectures or even in houses of worship. There's no latency here. Vizrt's technology can help solve problem in real time. So if you're unable to get to your broadcast studio, this make it not a problem anymore. 

Lang didn't just want to be a talking head when showing off their technology. He wanted to demonstrate it's power. "“Zoom-style interviews may become the norm, but with our technology, we can do better. We wanted to inspire our customers by showing them what is possible. How do you bring two storytellers together in one place? This is the question we were trying to answer when we decided to use the Monarch EDGE encoder and decoder devices. The 4:2:2 10-bit video that the Monarch EDGE provides was critical to allow us to achieve the quality of keying we needed to make the production truly convincing," said Lang. 

The Monarch EDGE meets all of Vizrt's technical needs. What they needed to do was make lots of people for multiple locations look as if in the same room. They used multiple virtual studios completely green screened which was rendered out with Vizrt's Viz Engine 4.1 compositing, real time 3D rendering, and video play out platform. They also used SRT (Secure Reliable Transport). Check out this video we did on SRT here!  This let's low latency video be sent over IP on any public network. 

The Results

The results was a virtual one on one conversation between Lang and Black. Cameras shot them from different studios at their individual locations. During this, the Monarch EDGE encoder was used in Norway. The Monarch EDGE decoder was used in Austria. SDI cameras were used to capture the video with embedded audio. The decoder received the stream then output it via an SDI feed with audio to the Viz Engine 4.1 system in Austria. 

A second SDI camera sent an SDI with embedded audio to the same system which created the final product. This was all streamed to Vimeo, Facebook-Live, and Linkedin. They also had a proxy playback sent to both Black for program monitoring on a laptop. 

They also tried this with 3 people, which involved a similar setup. A single Monarch EDGE decoder takes up to four streams at a time. Dr. Andrew Cross (President of Global Research and Development for Vizrt) looked to be in the same room with Land and Black. Dr. Cross was located in the US. The Monarch EDGE encoder captured and encoded the feed. It was also used to decode feeds coming from the other Monarch EDGE's from Europe. The end result made it look as if 3 people were in the same room together all at once. 

The Monarch EDGE encoder/decorder can encode 4:2:2 10-bit video and transport them via SRT over any public network. This ability made it simple for Vizrt to make their virtual set realistic. 

Land said, “We wanted the end result to be a seamless viewing experience for the people watching... We didn’t want the viewers to say, ‘Wow, this is great technology.’ Instead, we wanted seamless interaction with the video so viewers can focus on the story. We could not have accomplished that without the Monarch EDGE encoder and decoder.”

Read the original article here!

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If you are interested in the Matrox Monarch EDGE, call us at 800-323-2325 and we can help you find a local dealer and installer.