Matrox Monarch EDGE targets remote production [sponsored]

Few technologies have had such an impact on live work as the pandemic fuelled pivot towards remote production, and products such as the Matrox Monarch EDGE are now helping refine the workflows established in the pandemic.

Soon it’s going to be hard to remember that we ever did it differently. The rise in remote production has been one of the stand-out consequences of the Covid pandemic; a rapid acceleration in technology and a workflow that, already looking good from an economic and environmental angle, all of a sudden became absolutely necessary to keep the show on the road.

Products such as Matrox’s Monarch EDGE 4K/multi-HD encoders and decoders are helping multiple organisations refine the process too, building on these first frantic deployments and kludges by offering evolved tools that are designed specifically for remote.

Essentially they help produce more broadcast-quality content with fewer resources by transporting multiple synchronized camera feeds over dedicated WAN, LAN, or internet and back to the studio—with glass-to-glass latency as low as 100 ms— and critically they do this for SDI-based productions. Equipped with tally and talkback to facilitate bi-directional communication between on-site camera operators and in-studio personnel, as well as genlock support to keep signals in synch, they allow productions to shift to remote without having to make wholesale changes to IP production along the entire workflow. 

They're cost-effective too. Because they are purpose-built for enabling remote production, broadcasters don’t need to purchase extra equipment and glue components to make the whole thing work. The Monarch EDGE, for example, includes 4K support, tally, and talkback at no extra cost; one box provides a lot of functionality.

Think of them as providing the on and off-ramps to the motorway (or interstate, or autobahn depending on where you’re reading this) that seamlessly link two wildly different locations — the event and the production centre. In fact, given the low latency of the whole setup, make that motorway more of an inter-dimensional wormhole; 100ms is easily quick enough for smooth bi-directional production.  

It’s continually being refined too. The latest update to the system saw the release of the Monarch EDGE Command Center web user interface that aims to simplify and enhance the management of the Monarch EDGE kit within remote production environments. Accessible via a standard browser, it allows broadcasters and live event producers to directly access, control, and operate all the Monarch EDGE appliances from any location and device. That should help make the set-up of the events that bit quicker and easier. And with sustainability arguments gaining in volume all the time, the amount of remote production is only going to increase in the coming years.

Find out more about MATROX here.