SONAPS in the Lisbon and Porto editorial offices of SIC

The private Portuguese channel opts for Sony's news production system both in its central newsroom in Lisbon and in Porto. Among other benefits, working in this environment means unifying all the activities of the different users and areas into a single management level, thus managing to optimize and accelerate interconnected workflows in a more logical way.

The Portuguese SIC has trusted in the proposal for the unified production of SONAPS news programs Sony both for its central editorial office in Lisbon and at its headquarters in Porto.

SONAPS will offer SIC effective workflows by integrating all user activities into a single management level, keeping the different areas interconnected without gaps between the different management systems in areas such as ingesting and searching for material, editing, play-out, filing and cleaning or between the specific tasks of each user or work group.

Using industry-standard interface protocols (MXF, FTP, generic XML), the system provides a powerful and easy-to-use editor that allows you to reduce advanced editing positions, with the consequent reduction in costs. Optionally, SONAPS can support a Near Line Archive. The archiving process can be managed centrally through automatic criteria or through selections that can be made by the users themselves. In addition to being able to manually recover material from archive, the contents necessary for the adaptation of an EDL are automatically restored to disk (as a partial file).

Another advantage of SONAPS is the association of metadata from the capture, especially effective in the case of working with XDCAM, to the file, allowing the metadata to be enriched throughout the entire process.

Thanks to its intuitive interfaces, operation with SONAPS is simple even in very powerful workflows, achieving maximum productivity from editors to filmmakers working in the background, thus freeing editors immediately for the next task. This, in addition to speeding up the work, ensures a homogeneous style with the choice of storyboard or timeline editing commands.

Security and scalability

From a security point of view, all management functions and interfaces, although robust (PSU, disks) can be duplicated and/or grouped, and may have N+1 or N+several resources, depending on the critical level of the process.

Another of the most striking aspects of Sonaps is that it can be expanded while fully operational by incorporating play-out, storage or client resources. In this way, SIC will be able, for example, at any time to add another server to the play-out for a new study or additional ports for ingestion, while professionals can continue working at the same time without having their activity suspended.

As far as graphics are concerned, graphics can be stored in SONAPS and the XPRi NS editor supports both graphic and video formats commonly used on the web such as WM9.

In the case of SIC, both the Lisbon and Porto newsrooms are interconnected since the solution proposed by Sony allows access to the proxy to be shared from several locations, automating the transfer of high-resolution material between them. In file, SONAPS supports the file system currently implemented in SIC, Harris Arkemedia, being able to export and import high resolution MXF OP1A video and audio files and associated metadata through Common Gateway Hot Folders.

Finally, note that Sony's solution supports working simultaneously with both SD and HD material, allowing a simple and non-destructive update between formats. Supported formats include standard definition IMX 30/40/50Mbps,