Telestream PRISM, an 8K Monitoring and Production Tool Demonstrated at NAB 2022
Telestream had a large booth at NAB 2022 and showed their PRISM product, an ST 2110 waveform monitor that now supports 8K Capture and Monitoring.
The product has many features, and two Olympics games broadcasters that transmitted 8K video used its waveform monitoring capability with their live broadcast feeds. In most instances, PRISM would be integrated into an existing workflow and offers HTTP API to make integration easier. PRISM is available in four different form factors on the company’s website.
The tool handles wide color gamut, HDR, and next-gen audio by enabling real-time checking of
- levels
- color
- CIE (Gamut)
- metadata
We are still in the early days for live 8K production, but the two primary uses that have emerged so far for PRISM are:
- Monitoring – Alarms setup is relatively sophisticated and can seem complex with dozens of options. As with any professional-level tool, almost everything is adjustable.
- PRISM is also a tool for just getting the image right within live workflows and postproduction limits.
Telestream told me that one of PRISM’s design goals was to help ensure that HD, 4K, and 8K images are similar.
During the demo, I got to see just how customizable the user interface was with two Telestream demonstrators showing me different ways of doing the same thing. The UI supports up to 8 tiles on a dual-screen or extended desktop.
Telestream’s PRISM monitoring tool is a Quality Control instrument for both file-based and live workflows in the form of a Waveform monitor. The demo I saw in Vegas used a lower-resolution view on the display. PRISM operates in the uncompressed video space with ST.2110 support up to 4K. For 8K, four 12G-SDI connections are still required. We’ll update you as soon as this limitation is removed.
Elsewhere in the Telestream NAB booth, some other tools were relevant to 8K but without a dedicated demo. Vantage is one of Telestream’s file-based products that can deal with 8K. It can, for example, be used for the automation of downscaling 8K to 4K. Vantage is software-based leveraging GPUs as part of complex workflows.
