The setup for the CUE 2016 National Conference, which utilized the Roland V-800HD Multi-Format Video Switcher.

The CUE 2016 National Conference, which took place March 17-19 in Palm Springs, CA, is the largest education technology conference in California, and for over 35 years has been among the largest in the United States. It draws educators, technology coordinators, administrators and other education professionals who are looking to see how technology can more deeply support student achievement. They come from all over the country, and often with a dizzying array of video formats for presentations that take place one after the other. In an environment where presentations need to be seamless and the technology needs to be at the leading edge, yet work within budget, the Roland V-800HD Multi-Format Video Switcher is the required solution. The V-800HD is a true multi-format video mixer, not requiring input sources to be matched to output resolutions: every input has its own broadcast-quality scaler that can individually scale, stretch, crop and zoom each source as needed for the output resolution chosen.

“In my opinion, the V-800HD is the absolute best value in video switchers available,” comments Scott Ramsay, President of Torrance, CA-based Broadcast Support, Inc., which provides broadcast-quality AV equipment for a wide range of events, and who has sold two Roland V-800HD switchers to AV Professionals, the full-service AV-systems provider that managed the presentation technologies for the CUE 2016 National Conference. “The main meeting room that was used for keynotes and the general sessions was also used as a large breakout room, so it was constantly in use. One V-800HD switcher was used for the center 20 x 11-foot, 3.9-mm pixel pitch LED display, and the other was assigned to the two 16 x 9-foot projection screens on either side of the LED screen. Presentations came in using every kind of video format imaginable, from PC to Mac to composite to component, but there wasn’t anything that the V-800s couldn’t handle.”

Garth Fjellstrom, President of AV Professionals, says the V-800HD has become a mainstay of his live-event production work. In addition to the CUE 2016 National Conference, he’s had the V-800HD on site at Los Angeles’ landmark Orpheum Theatre for an L.A. Metro event, and barely a week after the CUE event it was used at the Rolling Hills Covenant Church near Long Beach, CA. “We had the V-800HD in a tent showing I-MAG to over 4,000 people for an Easter celebration, and the CUE event had more than 7,000 people in the main room,” he recalls. “The V-800HD has the level of reliability that you want for events of that kind of scale. Plus, it’s very flexible in terms of inputs; most of what we do is HD-SDI, but occasionally some media is presented using VGA or HDMI — the V-800HD can handle them easily. It does a lot of the work for you, and that kind of versatility is crucial to making complex, large-scale events run smoothly.”

Ramsay, who was on site at the CUE 2016 National Conference to lend an additional layer of technical support for AV Professionals’ team there, concurs. “The V-800HD is the ideal piece of equipment for so many types of events, but it’s particularly well suited for an education conference like this one because it delivers such high-quality performance and handles so many different types of video formats at a fraction of the cost of other switchers,” he says. “It’s simply the best value out there for multi-format video switchers, and its reliability is second to none.”

The Roland V-800HD Multi-Format Video Switcher is a true multi-format video mixer. Most every type of digital and analog input is available, in video or computer format; on the output side, a built-in HDMI multi-viewer output provides a convenient monitoring solution. In addition to video channels, two channels are available for still images, which upload by USB memory stick or frame grab. Ten assignable video cross-points allow the reordering of channel buttons. A dedicated composite output allows for a down-converted SD signal to always be ready for use in archiving to a DVD recorder or to an encoder for streaming. Multi-Zoom functionality can be enabled when one video input is shared internally with up to three more inputs. The scaler for each input can zoom into any position in the video image to give the appearance that additional cameras are connected, thus creating a virtual multi-camera environment.