The What: Williams AV has introduced Annotation PRO, its next generation annotation system designed for the professional AV and broadcast markets. Annotation PRO brings 4K video to system designers who wish to add annotation to their professional 4K video designs. With the enhanced broadcast graphics capabilities of the NVIDA processor, the Annotation PRO provides graphical annotation overlays that are designed to provide brilliant detail, crisp colors, and sharp images.
The What Else: The Annotation PRO is built on a NVIDA Pascal GPU system architecture with 256 NVIDIA CUDA cores, and can deliver real-time video processing with less than two frames of latency. The embedded software application runs on a Linux OS and offers upgrade possibilities that are unavailable in a hardware-based FPGA or ASIC solutions.
With two digital video inputs, a HDMI and USB 3.0 video, and PIP (Picture-In-Picture) capabilities, the system can be configured to support many different dual video output viewing configurations such as near-end/far-end video, people and content, judge and defendant, and so on. The USB 3.0 can also be configured for video capture applications.
“Annotation Pro is a totally new annotation platform designed for live annotation applications where high-resolution imaging is required,” said Rob Sheeley, president and CEO of Williams AV. “This system is unlike those other lower resolution HD 1080 annotation systems. The Annotation Pro is designed to support true 4K video which is now the standard being used by professional AV integrators."
The Bottom Line: Made for the AV integrator, the Annotation PRO is designed to be easily integrated into any system design. Depending upon the project requirement the Annotation PRO can be ordered in either a Non-HDCP (Annotation PRO) at $2,995 or as a HDCP compliant (Annotation PRO Plus) device at $3,995.
