Device Will Support Recording and Playing Four HD Streams or Two 4K Streams at 30p

Convergent Design is set to preview Athena, a new 4K/multistream recording and playback system supporting record and playback of up to 4K 60p — or up to two simultaneous output streams of 4K at 30p — for digital cinema (such as stereo projection) or digital signage applications. The company plans to make it available by year's end.

The Athena will support two streams of 2K and HD 4:4:4 12-bit RGB at up to 60p, four streams at up to 30p, and four streams of HD 4:2:2 video at up to 30p, the company said.

In addition to its straightforward function as a studio deck (ProRes, DNxHD, or DPX files can be loaded onto SSD via a PC or over Gig-E for playback), that makes the 1U half-rack Athena a particularly interesting device in an HD pipeline for live event recording and field production, with the promised ability to stream live multi-camera footage from a shoot to post-production via Gigabit Ethernet. Proxies can be streamed over Gig-E simultaneous with full 4K 30p or HD 30p recording.

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The company stressed that the Athena's functions will be hardware-based for reliability; it's not just software running on off-the-shelf PC hardware. IO options include four 6G-SDI ins and outs, two Display Port 1.2a outputs, two HDMI 2.0 outputs, four channels of AES audio, 64 channels of MADI audio, 64 channels of Dante audio via Gig-E, 16 channels of SDI embedded audio, and balanced analog stereo audio out.

Convergent will only have a "product preview" at NAB (in its booth C7113), with a production model scheduled to debut at IBC this fall. The Athena is slated to ship to customers sometime in the fourth quarter. The following are current specs and suggested potential applications, as provided by Convergent Design.