GEAR HEADS
BARCO IMAGEPRO-4K Abbe Westerlundh, Senior Product Specialist, ImagePROcessing talks to TPi about the ImagePRO-4K... How long did the R&D process take in order to complete the Barco ImagePRO-4K? With LED tiles, year after year, the trend has been toward ever tighter pixel pitches and we realised large-scale events would be moving towards using more pixels than ever. To create a product that did this well - within the events production industry - we would have to adopt more devices capable of utilising the latest 4K60p signals. Early on in 2016, we began to look at developing a successor to the ImagePRO-II. Around the same time, we were very deep in development for the Event Master platform, so we needed to find a solution that fit our development schedule. R&D started looking at the design and how to support 4K60p. During the design phase of our second-generation Event Master input and output cards, that would need to support 4K60p on a single connector. Our Director of Technology, and the R&D team, came up with the idea of the Tri-Combo cards. The cards would be designed to use the latest standards (HDMI 2.0, DP1.2, and 12G SDI) and they would provide a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ approach to digital video connections. This began our development of the Event Master 4K60p Tri-Combo input and output cards, and what would be the heart of the ImagePRO-4K. Concurrently, we were also in the middle of a new low-profile stage box, one of our customers had asked of us, as a solution to use with the E2 and S3. This new chassis came to be called the EX, which is a box that both expands the capacity of an E2 or S3 signals to the stage. This new processor allowed the system to expand input or output capacity without adding another E2 or S3 processor. Using our system linking connectors, we were able to qualify a fiber extension solution as well that allowed for the stage box to be placed up to 100m away from the main processor. Realising the power and versatility of this new box, the EX became the perfect platform to start the ImagePRO-4K. We continued development of the Tri-Combo cards and the EX, putting the ImagePRO plans in the drawer until we had all the components ready. We began shipping the Tri-combo input card
in October, 2017 and the output card in February, 2018. The factory preconfigured Tri-combo variants of E2, S3 and EX are now our most popular selling configurations. With all the major components now in place, we pulled the ImagePRO4K plans back out of the drawer in January of 2018 and began the rest of the design and development work in earnest. The plan sounded simple - take new cards and put them in a new chassis, rework the mother board, and add a front panel. If only it were as fast and easy as it sounds! Not only were we working with the latest tech, but also wanted to modernise the look and feel of the ImagePRO. The first thing we did was change the readout display type from the old VFD (the green fluorescent display) to a daylight viewable colour LCD display, giving us the ability to show modern looking menus, and live video. This brought its own integration challenges with mechanics, viewing angles, and software to drive the new display. The new ImagePRO-4K was previewed to select customers at InfoComm 2018. After collecting customer feedback, we went through a few more 3D prints and software revisions to make sure we were keeping the ImagePRO look and even more importantly, the feel. In October 2018, we held our final quality review, confirming we are ready for release, and started shipping soon after. It’s was a huge team effort! Where does it sit in the Barco family of products? The ImagePRO-4K is the latest product added to our very successful line of ImagePRO products, and it is also now part of the Event Master family. These are two big reputations to protect. The ImagePRO-4K has a brilliant scaler, converter, sync generator, and is an all-around video problem solver. We see the Event Master heritage when you open up the Event Master Toolset, our control software. It is here one can really open up the power of the ImagePRO-4K and use it as more powerful switcher, or even as a multiformat scaling matrix router with up to six inputs and outputs. 88
