German fiber network specialist, Optocore, is reportedly breaking new barriers in its technological evolution, as demonstrated at last week’s ISE Show in Barcelona with the new 12G-SDI standard.
With the increasing demand for higher bandwidth in both the broadcast and live event spaces, 12G-SDI is a logical option to support higher-speed UHD formats (4K, 8K etc), with higher bitrates and a greater number of colours.
Explaining the move, Optocore technical support engineer Marci Sós stated, “The advantages are obvious. As market leaders in fiber distribution, our pledge is always to keep ahead of the technological curve, supporting new standards in the evolving world of broadcast signal transmission to ensure the best outcome for our customers, and meet their demands.”
Optocore and sister brand, BroaMan, are said to have been early subscribers to this evolution, ensuring its devices are capable of delivering uncompressed, unencrypted video signals, securely and robustly.
With eight times the bandwidth of standard HD-SDI, 12G-SDI allows the transmission of high frame rate and deep colour 4K/UltraHD signals, supporting rates up to 100/120fps over a single cable.
Consequently, BroaMan has been able to announce three 12G SDI capable models in its product portfolio: Mux22-12G / Repeat48-12G / Repeat48WDM-12G, all of which were showcased at ISE.
Optocore also announced a new, advanced four-channel version of its M12 Redundancy Firmware, which it sees as a further step towards reliability, flexibility and ease of use.
While the standard Redundant firmware upgrade gives the user the possibility of switching between the upper row and lower row on a GPI trigger, the new version reportedly enables triggering of the switchover for individual pairs of MADI streams. In other words, in a playback rig of four primary interfaces and two secondaries, a GPI trigger for MADI2 will switch the input routing only to MADI6 and leave everything else unaltered.
For enhanced compatibility and ease of use with DiGiCo consoles, the standby input routing for the MADI 5, 6, 7 and 8 streams are copied automatically from MADI 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively. This means that if the user’s playback and recording devices are not utilising all 64 channels (32 at 96k), allocating the sufficient number of channels to each stream provides the possibility of using the M12 to maximum capacity.