Saudi order rounds off successful year at Courtyard

Courtyard Electronics have recently supplied a range of equipment for use by the Ministry of Information, Saudi Arabia.
The package includes 11 Sheriff serial legalisers, representing the biggest single order to date for this highly regarded product. There are also seven SoftClock NLE countdown clocks and a LogoDog on-air logo generator and text inserter.
Steve Cranny, Courtyard’s sales director, said: “We are delighted with the Saudi order. It reflects the very good acceptance that Sheriff has had throughout the European broadcast market where we are receiving many follow-on orders. We are also experiencing a growing interest in SoftClock which extends our industry-standard countdown clocks into the burgeoning area of non-linear editing.”
Sheriff checks video and correct any signals that produce illegal colours and break the Gamut Law. It is supplied with SDI inputs and outputs to allow perfect signal transparency. Sheriff can operate as a technical gatekeeper and then offer ‘invisible’ correction. It detects and shows exactly which parts of the picture are illegal and logs any out-of-gamut errors, or illegal colours, that are produced by certain combinations of the components in SDI signals. The errors are clearly displayed as distinct colours overlaid on the preview output with their hue indicating the degree of error. When corrections are needed, the techniques applied alter the signal values in such a way that there is no obvious or visible trace of the correction. The lack of hue shifts, or other artefacts produced during correction is a major feature of the product.
SoftClock for NLE is a fully customisable countdown/leader clock and provides ample space for ID information, logos etc. This is a PC application that produces a sequence of Targa files or an AVI file, which can be dropped into a nonlinear editor’s timeline. It is a fully customisable countdown/leader clock and provides ample space for ID information, logos and so on.
LogoDog is the most user-friendly logo generator available for the insertion of logos and text from small ‘bug’ styles to full screen versions. It is ideal for on-air channel branding and can import almost any graphic image format so logo designs from a wide range of graphics packages can be accepted. Image keys can also be stored to control the logo’s displayed transparency and softness. LogoDog can be used upstream or downstream as it includes its own internal keyer in addition to offering a key signal output. It can also be installed on a network and complete logo profiles – image, key, size, text etc. – can be called up as required.
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