Fox Sports Southwest recently upgraded its media playback system with the addition of Hippotizer Karst+ media servers from Green Hippo, specialist creator of tools for the real-time manipulation of video for the AV industries.
The Hippotizer system was chosen for its ability to deliver greater flexibility, and for its features including control of color correction and real-time control of display formatting.
Adam Towell, chief engineer for Fox Sports Southwest, had first encountered Hippotizer systems while working on concerts around the U.S. “I’d enjoyed how robust the system was,” he said. When he came to look more closely at what Hippotizer could offer to improve the studio’s operations, he was further impressed by the system’s advanced feature set.
“Color correction had been a struggle with our older system,” Towell said. “We strive for a color temperature of 5600K on set, to be as close to daylight as we can. But sometimes you need that extra ability, which the Hippotizer Karst+ has natively, when it comes to color correction. In the past we had additional color correctors in play that were all independently set, but with the Karst you can blanket your settings across all displays at the same time. The flexibility of the content delivery makes the Hippotizer Karst+ a strong asset.”
The studio’s video content is played to a four-screen digital monitor wall, as well as to additional monitor screens placed around the set. “We needed a system that was intuitive and could provide HD-SDI connections,” Towell said. “We are utilizing the Datapath FX4 to split the Green Hippo Karst+ into eight HD-SDI signals for the set. The Hippotizer Karst+ delivers on every need, and the depth of the system toolkit allows for further flexibility during productions.”
“The color correction, the ease of building a custom digital environment, the scalability of the system, and the support from Green Hippo have been excellent and appealed to us from the start,” Towell said. “The graphics department now has more control of how their content is delivered, and with the addition of the Elgato Stream Deck, our technical directors can input graphics at their leisure with image previews on the controller before it goes to set.”
