What Vitec’s Acquisition of Focus Enhancements Means to Live Producers

Optibase, Stratus, and Focus Enhancements—three companies with ties to live production and video distribution—have been acquired by VITEC Multimedia in recent months.

VITEC, based in Paris, France, has over 20 years of experience in developing MPEG-based digital video solutions, primarily for OEMs and systems integrators.

Focus Enhancements is best known for its Videonics line of video mixers and switchers, which range from analog to multi-input Firewire-based video mixers. Recent additions includes compact HD-SDI video mixers that provide basic HD-SDI mixing for field use.

Acquired in July by Vitec Multimedia, a Paris-based company that also recently acquired Optibase, Focus has a history in creating broadcast capture devices that leverage on-the-fly format conversion as a core feature. The product line that Focus Enhancements has in its arsenal that takes the most advantage of format conversion is FireStore.

FireStore compact digital video recorders use the FireWire port on broadcast and prosumer cameras to capture a bit-for-bit transfer of the DV or HDV stream to a hard drive. The value-add that the FireStore Direct To Edit (DTE) technology adds is the ability to select the appropriate video editing format—before shooting—that corresponds to the non-linear editing system that will be used to edit the content.

This is important for two reasons: first, while all the bits are the same for any captured HDV or DV file, the formats required by various non-linear editing tools—Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Avid and a host of additional nonlinear systems—vary greatly.

Each requires a different way for the file to be formatted to the appropriate editing tool: some require audio to be interleaved between video frames, while other editing systems expect to see the audio at the end or at the beginning of the file. Normally this would require a lengthy conversion process after video capture, but the DTE does the conversion to a particular protocol as content is captured. Second, not only can FireStore be used as an augmentation to tape-based video capture, but it can also be used to replace the tape within the camera if a videographer is looking to go to a tapeless workflow.

The capture device doubles as a hard drive for in-the-field editing, allowing content that’s streamed as part of a live production to immediately be connected to a video transcoding system to convert the DV or HDV files to a web-friendly video format.

Since FireStore is equally applicable to live production and rapid in-the-field post-production workflows, it’s also possible that Focus Enhancements’ expertise in rapid format conversion could be put to good use for VITEC’s MPEG-based product lines, allowing MPEG-2 files to be converted to HDV or vice-versa.

Finally, Focus Enhancements also has its hands deep into the media asset management space, thanks to its Germany-based subsidiary, COMO, which was also acquired by VITEC. The flagship product, Proxsys, is a media asset management system that tracks and maintains content from capture / ingest to editing and playout. According to the COMO website,  these turnkey asset management system are part of more than 150 worldwide installations.

“In combination with our recent acquisition of Optibase, this acquisition furthers our objective to provide a complete line of advanced digital video solutions to our customers around the globe,” said Philippe Wetzel, CEO of VITEC Multimedia. “With innovation at its core, the VITEC R&D division—now with more than 100 esteemed engineers—is uniquely positioned to deliver innovative solutions for a wide range of advanced digital video applications—managing the entire video process from source to display.”

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.