Grass Valley is introducing a new conform/render server that allows editors to be more productive when working in a K2 shared storage area network (SAN) environment and using Grass Valley Aurora 7.0 and EDIUS 5.1 HD editing workstations. The new PC server is ideal for fast-paced, multi-client production environments developing a wide variety of content from multiple SD and HD sources.

The Grass Valley EDIUS XRE (eXternal Rendering Engine) server comes as a turnkey system and lets editors request that a project created with EDIUS systems in an Aurora or K2 Production Storage environment be rendered automatically on a separate dedicated workstation while they go on to the next job. There’s no delay or tying up an edit station while having to wait for that project to be rendered. Serving as a unique and powerful conform server, the EDIUS XRE accepts the various full-resolution project elements and, by selecting “XRE export” on the EDIUS timeline, immediately and automatically creates finished files in the background while the editors go on to the next project.

“The new Grass Valley EDIUS XRE server reduces the time-consuming step of having to wait for edits and effects to be rendered from a multi-format timeline into a single format,” said Jeff Rosica, senior vice president of Grass Valley. “Our goal with all of our editing products is to make creative teams as productive as they can be. The EDIUS XRE server streamlines the multi-format editing process and allows professionals to gain more value from their Grass Valley editing systems.”

Among multiple editors, projects are cued up in order of importance using a “Priority” setting on the XRE server. The finished files can be copied to a network drive to be used again as source, or sent by FTP to playout servers. There’s no limit to the number of EDIUS clients that can access the XRE server and multiple XRE servers can be used to batch process multiple jobs—improving performance and productivity even further.

EDIUS XRE also comes with a Job Management application that allows users to watch the current job cue status from PCs connected to the network, and also allows management such as cancel/pause the current job to change the order of processing.

Pricing and Availability
The Grass Valley EDIUS XRE server will be available in June 2009 and is priced at $15,000.