AJA adds Dolby Audio and BT.2020 support to openGear cards via update

The AJA openGear OG-Hi5-4K-Plus, OG-HA5-4K, OG-4K2HD and OG-12GM cards have received a firmware update that gives them Dolby Audio and BT.2020 support, among other benefits.

Growing consumer adoption of Dolby Atmos sound systems has driven greater use of immersive audio technology in the field. As audio is processed and rendered between equipment, data loss is a risk, however, thanks to the latest v1.6.1 update, the OG-Hi5-4K-Plus preserves the embedded audio pass-through for Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus compressed audio, including DD+ Atmos immersive sound. This allows professionals to control and validate that the immersive audio being produced reaches the end viewers.

On the other hand, HDR is rapidly evolving into a production standard, requiring more metadata to be transported from SDR and HDR equipment throughout the chain. New firmware versions of the AJA openGear cards reduce the potential for colour and brightness errors to occur during this process through the new VPID metadata pass-through for each openGear card with optional override functionality. By automating the HDR metadata pass-through, the new enhancement makes it easier for upstream equipment to generate HDR metadata and pass it on to downstream equipment, without having to manually strip or configure it along the way.

Support for BT.2020

In addition to these enhancements, the AJA openGear cards receive a number of significant improvements: automatic infoframe generation; custom HDMI metadata generation and mastering display information for HDMI outputs; additional HDR capabilities with colour space converter support for BT.2020 on the OG-Hi5-4K-Plus and OG-HA5-4K models; dual-link support for two 1.5G outputs on the OG-HA5-4K; and support for two 6G input and output formats (two 3G and two 1.5G) on the OG-12GM.

Nick Rashby, president of AJA, helps to understand the growing relevance of its openGear family: “openGear-compatible conversion technology is in high demand, as video professionals across industries look for simpler ways to produce high-end audio and visual content for remote and streaming workflows, live events, post-production, and beyond. To aid in this pursuit, we’ve extended the capabilities of our production-proven openGear cards to support the latest industry standards, including HDR, WCG and BT.2020 color spaces and Dolby Atmos.”

These new improvements are designed to help professionals keep HDR and immersive audio signals and metadata intact as they move throughout various equipment in the production chain, ultimately ensuring a more pristine viewer experience,” he adds.