Artear enters the digital era with the start-up of a new production center

Artear's new production center features ten studios and a variety of broadcast editing systems, including Adobe Creative Suite and Avid Media Central with Telestream's Vantage-based file encoding and processing.

Artear, one of Argentina's leading media companies and distributor of multichannel video programming (MVPD) for news and entertainment content, has just opened a New 2,600 square meter content production center.

The center, one of the largest in Latin Americaa, has ten studios and a variety of broadcast editing systems, including Adobe Creative Suite and Avid Media Central.

Owned by the Argentine media conglomerate, Clarín, Artear produces and distributes varied and agile content in Spanish, such as soap operas, contests, news, talent shows...

To compete effectively in the digital age, ArtearIt distributes and distributes about a dozen channels in a universe Cross-platform which includes free-to-air television, cable and digital sites, including the free-to-air channels El Trece (Channel 13 in Buenos Aires), El Doce (Channel 12 in Córdoba), Channel 10 (Channel 10 in Bahía Blanca) and Channel Siete (Channel 7 in Bariloche); the news channel TN (Todo Noticias); Volver, a cable channel of classic Argentine cinema; Ciudad Magazine, with an online program on lifestyles; and the Spanish-language music channel, Quiero.

The challenge

A fundamental element of these editing environments is the system Vantage Transcode Pro Telestreamwhat Automate file transcoding and processing of media and video content moving in and out of editing, storage, and asset management systems.

The Vantage Transcode Pro platform offers an Avid option that allows you to interfaces seamlessly with the editing environment Avid. And, to ensure high-quality cross-platform distribution, Artear has also configured its Vantage system with another optional module, the Vantage Transcode Multiscreen, a GPU-accelerated solution for automating the Creating Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) Packages, essential to cater to today's viewers who prefer to watch videos on different connected devices.

With the addition of the Multiscreen component, Artear's Vantage media processing workflow encompasses ingest, transcoding, encryption, and delivery of content to CDNs and playout servers. It also supports Apple HLS, Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH, H.264 and H.265 formats as well as progressive MP4 downloads.

The Solution

At Artear, José Gabriel Ciccarelli is one of the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the environment Avid MediaCentral, which is composed of systems of edition Media Composer that interact directly with the asset management system of Avid Interplay production and the Isis Shared Storage.

As a long-time Avid development partner, Telestream has created Avid Connect, a sophisticated interface that allows its powerful Vantage Transcode Pro media processing platform to seamlessly serve and support Avid MediaCentral's workflow.

Today Vantage Automates a Wide Range of Processes media to Artear, including ingesting media from a watch folder directly into Interplay and/or ISIS; conversion between formats, codecs, and frame rates; or the creation of adaptive bitrate packages for cross-platform distribution.

In addition, it can handle broadcast codecs, such as XDCAM HD 50/35Mbps/ProRes 422 and DNx-HD-120/185/220Mbps, as well as H.264/x264/H.265 and GoPro Cineform.

Allows media expansion and adding fades in/out and overlays of movies and images, as well as the generation of proxies for archive

In terms of audio, it offers the mixing of audio channels and normalization tasks, such as loudness correction.

Vantage performs these tasks in a manner that preserves the metadata that is critical to searching, organizing, categorizing, and tracking content in facility storage and asset management systems.

Artear's Vantage Transcode Pro workflow is accelerated using four servers Telestream Lightspeed K80, plus 10 Dell CPU nodes running Vantage.

Artear plans to update its Vantage for better integration with Avid, including the ability to use an Interplay folder as a trigger for Flip actions. In the future, they also hope to replace traditional CPU nodes with Telestream's next-generation Lightspeed servers.

High flaxibility

Artear opted for Vantage because of the flexibility with which users could structure and program many different media processing workflows, simply and visually. This means having the flexibility to integrate different workflows according to the unique production and delivery requirements of each broadcast television channel, cable or digital.

To meet all of your distribution requirements, including display on a variety of home and mobile devices, Artear reuses every instance of video it produces in a variety of formats, using the Vantage Transcode Multiscreen workflow to automate the creation of adaptive bitrate (ABR) variants.

Considering the importance of the time factor for news content, Artear's most challenging workflows are related to the voluminous content that is broadcast on the TN cable news network and its transcoding into the formats suitable for use on the website TN.com.ar and international distribution channels.

The workflows associated with El Trece are complex because the programs watched on this main channel must be formatted and reused across all Artear platforms, including broadcast and cable television channels, the digital website eltrece.tv and international distribution.

Among the premium programs with a large audience produced by Artear and its production partners for El Trece are Simona (drama), Pasapalabra (contest), Los Ángeles de la Mañana (interviews) or Showmatch (dance talent show).

José Gabriel Ciccarelli, Media Workflow and ACSR Technician at Artear, acknowledges that "as our operations continue to grow, I can't imagine how we would handle our current media processing workload without Vantage. Vantage ensures that all videos, regardless of codec, format, bitrate, or quality, can be ingested into our MediaCentral ecosystem. It also ensures that material exported from our Avids is in the correct format for distribution to all of our websites and social media as quickly as possible."

"Before Vantage, we only needed to ingest about 150 Sony camera files per day into our Avid workflow. But, as the need for digital versions increases, we now rely on Vantage to solve our biggest challenge: to provide content to our viewers in the formats they need, where and when they want," concludes Ciccarelli.