Were getting close to a new release that includes support for Team Rosters and player headshots. Stay tuned for updates! We will include this awesome sample roster file so you can play around with it and get familiar with the new tool.

The NDI protocol by Newtek is a pretty amazing thing, but before NDI there was AirSend. You could think of AirSend as the older brother to NDI and it was used almost exclusively for Newtek products. Most people used it for getting graphics, with transparency, from their graphics system, such as LiveText.

When NDI came around, Newtek provided updates for AirSend transmitters to become NDI-enabled but unfortunately they never really provided a means for ALL older Tricasters to get updated to receive NDI. Some Tricasters were able to get updated to software that supported NDI, but some models didn’t have the right hardware and were unable to board the NDI train. And unfortunately, NewTek never provided a means of converting NDI to Airsend.

I approached Martin Kay with ZEN Computer Services in the UK about this predicament and have spent the last few weeks working with him to test the addition of AirSend conversion to his ZEN RTx re-transmitter application. While NDI is certainly a better technology than AirSend, there are still plenty of schools and non-profits that are using the older Tricasters and can’t take advantage of NDI and simply don’t have the funds to upgrade. Now they will have that ability at no cost thanks to ZEN RTx. ZEN RTX will work with any NDI source, not just SuiteCG.

Here is a quick look at the conversion in action.

A few caveats:

1. The AirSend conversion does not convert audio. All video sources will have audio stripped from them.

2. As shown in the video, the conversion does add some latency. This will probably vary based on system specs, but in this video the latecy looked to be about .2 seconds.

3. An unknown error prevents running the application on Windows 7. This may or may not be fixed given the trend toward NDI-enabled Tricasters and Windows 10 operating systems.

Anyone interested in trying this out can download RTx, as well as some other interesting NDI utilities, from http://www.zenvideo.co.uk/ndi.htm Martin does a lot of audiovisual/broadcasting services so if you’re in the UK, I recommend him for any equipment needs you might have.

A HUGE thanks to Martin Kay of ZEN Computer Services for working with me on this and providing a means for unlocking NDI for Tricaster users who until now have been locked out of NDI.

SuiteCG is excited to announce release 0.5.41 that includes a new feature: Clock Cameras. This new feature will allow users to point a camera (or two if needed) at the arena scoreboard and/or secondary clock display for the purpose of cropping the clocks and inserting them in to the scorebug and/or other graphics where the clock is desired.

Clock signals must be available as an NDI feed, which would require either a capture card or USB capture dongle and the free Newtek Connect program to convert the camera feed in to NDI. As opposed to performing a clock overlay inside of your production software, and then removing the overlay prior to displaying over graphics, these embedded clock feeds are a part of the graphics and will animate in and out along with the graphic of which they are a part. This new feature eliminates the need to track the clock manually, freeing up the operator for other tasks. While it lacks the more polished look of a pure digital text field, it has proven a more reliable method of clock insertion over OCR applications where cloudy skies and changing brightness and contrast can fool the OCR in to resolving digits incorrectly. While we are exploring external data solutions, like OCR and scoreboard data feeds, we believe live camera feeds are a fast, safe, and reliable method of providing your viewers with an accurate clock for your sports productions.

This new release is now available to download from the website or through the SuiteCG License Manager for anyone who has downloaded an earlier version of the program. Basketball, football (American), and football (soccer) graphics packages have been updated to support the clock camera feeds.

We have also added a Tutorial Video to the Knowledge Base explaining how to configure Clock Cameras.

A full list of SuiteCG updates can be found in the Changelog.

A special thanks to the University of Northwestern- St. Paul for their cooperation in recording scoreboard footage.

Welcome to the world, SuiteCG! We’ve been waiting a long time and now you’re ready for the world!

SuiteCG is now available for Download as well as purchase. A big thank you for your patience as we worked out all the small details over the past months. We still have more to add like team rosters and increase the number of sports we’ll offer. We also have a lot of Knowledge Base articles to complete.

Football (American) season is upon us and we have a crash course instructional video on the football user interface. Be sure to check it out:

Instructional videos on other sports will be posted over the next few weeks.

We know you’re (im)patiently waiting for the release of SuiteCG MultiSport Scoreboard. We are too! Our closed-group of testers have already had a chance to use it over the last few days to help us work out any unexpected kinks in the football user interface and it was well-worth it. We’ve discovered a few small items that we need to fix before we can release, and we’re working on finishing the Knowledge Base, which can now be found in the Support section of the website main menu.

We expect the release of SuiteCG very soon!