Avid's latest proposals for graphics and post-production at Connect Live Madrid

After a first Connect Live in Madrid last March dedicated to the Media Central platform and the Cloud UX interface, in this edition, graphic solutions and collaborative post-production environments have been the protagonists.

This Tuesday, the Mindway space in Madrid hosted the Avid Connect Live, a day in which professionals have been able to learn first-hand about their latest solutions for graphic and post-production environments. In the demo area, Avid has shown the latest news from Media Composer 2019 in charge of Gabriel Corbella, Avid Associate Consultant & Trainer; diferentes flujos de trabajo para noticias con MediaCentral Cloud UX and for post-production, by the hand of Raul Lobo, Avid Solutions Specialist; and the use of real-time graphics in news studies with Maestro PowerWall, with a demonstration by Vikas Choudhary, Avid Solutions Specialist.

After welcoming the attendees, Tom Evetts, vice president of sales for EMEA at Avid, and Gonzalo del Val, Avid EMEA Sales Manager Southern, gave way to an extensive program of presentations.

David Marteau, Avid GM & Regional Sales Director Southern EMEA, ha destacado que tras un primer Connect Live en Madrid el pasado mes de marzo dedicado a la plataforma Media Central y la interfaz Cloud UX, en esta edición, son las soluciones gráficas y entornos de postproducción colaborativos las protagonistas.

For his part, Gonzalo del Val has highlighted the importance that studio graphics are achieving as a way to attract and retain the audience, as well as new forms of remote production.

"The generalization of graphics under study is emerging as a new way of telling stories to enrich information with huge quantities of graphic elements. Having the same platform for creating and managing these elements is key," said del Val.

Raul Alba, Avid director of Product Management (Broadcast Solutions) has addressed the importance of integrating graphic solutions in production. He has pointed out that the audience demands more and more attractive content every day. “On-screen graphics, in-studio graphics and augmented reality make content more attractive than ever,” he commented. He has also addressed that the trend is for this graphics to not only be available in linear broadcast but on multiple platforms and destinations. "Better content, more content for more destinations and cheaper than ever... and without errors. Those are the trends," Alba acknowledged.

A key issue is efficiency: “doing more, better, with fewer resources, is the only way to be more efficient and automate processes.”

Avid offers tools that allow you to create content capable of attracting audiences, manage content and data efficiently and maximizing the value of the time invested in creating that content. Maestro PowerWall, Maestro AR, Maestro Virtual Set or Maestro Interactive, under study; Maestro News for newsrooms; and Maestro Live for the production of live shows such as sports are some of the proposals that we find in the Avid portfolio.

On the other hand, MediaCentral is Avid's platform that allows you to create content for news, sports, continuity,... One of its advantages is that its web interface allows you to assign tools according to roles.

The Integration of Maestro Graphics into MediaCentral allows access to the catalog of graphic templates (virtual sets, video walls, augmented reality...), see the animated preview of graphics, search and index images and video clips in the graphics, access from anywhere and at any time based on a development on HTML5. From there it will be just a matter of reproducing the graphics in real time, publishing on social networks or burning on a piece and all from the same environment.

Alba has stressed that "many people have a wrong idea of ​​how Avid works. Today, it is a very open company, with integration of Maestro with Media Central or Maestro with other news systems, or other graphics with Media Central. It is also possible to create developments to extend the functionalities of Media Central."

Avid's product management concluded its intervention by reviewing some of the latest success stories in which Avid technology has played a determining role. One of these cases is found in ITV Studios in London, which uses Avid graphics systems for screen, augmented reality and virtual studio. In the case of the French Next Radio Tv, Avid allows you to create graphics for screen and virtual reality, all integrated with an existing news system from a third party. Other projects worth highlighting are France Tv, with a virtual studio developed with the Unreal Engine; Global Tv (Canada) which makes extensive use of augmented reality; and Torneos (Argentina), which uses Maestro AR to combine analysis of plays or lineups with augmented reality, and graphics… all integrated into a single system.

Telemadrid

Antonio Tena, director of graphics at Telemadrid, has participated in this Avid Connect Live to publicize the graphic workflow used by regional television. Although Telemadrid has not yet migrated to the latest versions of Maestro, everything is under control with iNews.

“The key is to make smart graphics", to gain agility through automatic templates", Tena highlighted. In this case, the operator only has to launch from the iNews ladder that is connected through MOS with Maestro with a double rundown, the one that comes from MOS and the one that comes from iNews itself"...

This intelligent labeling with database integration allows you to generate meteorological, sports, traffic graphic content quickly and with few resources with direct import of XML databases.

Telemadrid's news programs have stood out for a couple of seasons for the presence of a megavideowall that make up a canvas with five image outputs that make up a spectacular background. Antonio Tena has given details about how this megascreen operates, concluding that "for all intents and purposes it is a super-large sign launched by the same operator from the same iNews list and Maestro execution."

For virtual, extended and augmented reality, Telemadrid has a system of trackeo the Mo-Sys with a 3D grid of the set.

SIC and France Télévisions

José Lopes, director of operations at SIC, has explained how the private Portuguese channel has made graphics its ally to turn audiences around in just a few months.

Taking advantage of the launch of a new headquarters, the Portuguese channel trusted Sony, Telefónica Audiovisual Services and the integrator Vantec to carry out a technological revolution by migrating from SD-SDI to video over IP under the SMPTE 2110 standard.

In the new SIC studies, the graphic image has been an element that has been carefully cared for. Unlike other television stations where different tools are used to create virtual sets, signage, graphics, video wall images, etc., in the case of SIC it has been unified under a centralized graphic infrastructure. This way it produces all graphic templates for all areas using the same workflow and the same tools.

This means that any graphic element, including broadcast graphics, LED video walls, full-color graphics, virtual scenery or augmented reality, are created with the same tool using the same workflow and the same broadcast solution. This workflow serves a Huge graphics infrastructure including 48 channels of Avid Maestro PowerWall to fill large LED walls in a total of 73 square meters, 10 AR and virtual channels with complete freedom of camera movement, 14 video channels and 6 graphic channels, all under a centralized infrastructure, which serves the three news studios.

Lopes has noted that any graphic element can be called from any of the two production controls to send signals to the air or to the screens of any of the three studios. On the other hand, the AP ENPS writing system is integrated with Maestro so that from their position any journalist or editor can browse any of the templates, be it signs, LED screens or augmented reality,... being able to fill in, choose images or the graphics channel that a certain sign will use.

Among these elements, the increasingly greater presence of augmented reality in their news. Vantec has integrated the three studios, one of them completely virtual, with three sensorized Stype Human Crane cranes, and the sensorized pedestal cameras with Stype's RedSpy technology, an optical system capable of starting tracking automatically and that does not require recalibration (the system emits an infrared light that is reflected to the camera by reflective markers installed on the ceiling and walls). To embed the chromas key SIC is using Ultimatte de Blackmagic Design.

At this moment, SIC is generating more than 50,000 graphic items in different programs on their channels.

Besides, Loïc Le Roux, graphics integrator in Luxiris Tv, has presented the case of France Télévisions, which makes masterful use of integration of motor Unreal con Maestro Designer. Last August, the French public conglomerate launched a new virtual studio with 3 cameras tracked with Mo-Sys, 3 HDVG4 and 3 Ultimatte. The use of Unreal allows you to create photorealistic effects with modern lighting tools, shadows, textures,… In this case, the contents are created with 3ds Max or Cinema 4d, imported into Unreal, and from there, through a “cooking” process, they are aired with HDVG 4 from Avid with Maestro control.

Post-production

Kate Ketcham, Avid director product management, has presented the latest news about Media Composer and the possibilities offered by distributed processing. Ketcham has stressed that “Media Composer It is the most used editing system in the media and entertainment industry, with the most flexible UI and UX.” Precisely, its panelable UI allows easy use and quick editing.

“In order to increase efficiency, Media Composer has an intuitive design for both those accustomed to the software and new users.”

On the other hand, he has commented on the possibilities it opens for OTT finishing and distribution compatible with industry standards such as ACES and IMF and has highlighted that its new engine allows it to work at 32-bit color and HDR as well as with native OP-1A media, saving time and storage space.

At the latest IBC, Avid announced snative support for ProRes RAW and decoding 64bit for DNxHR and DNxHD on MacOS via Pro Video Formats package.

The Media Composer family has now added Media Composer Enterprise. Large production teams now have the ability to customize the interface and tailor workspaces to different work roles, providing end users with access to only the tools and features they need. This capability gives teams better focus so they can complete jobs faster and with fewer errors. Media Composer Enterprise also integrates with Editorial Management 2019 to deliver innovation in collaborative workflow for post-production and allows creative teams to stay in sync.

He has also launched Media Composer Distributed Processing, an additional option that reduces response times and speeds up post-production by sharing the media processing load. Tasks that previously took hours can now be done in minutes, strengthening the competitive advantage of post-production centers and offering high-quality programming. It also offloads complex processing tasks when working in today's emerging high-resolution, HDR media-rich worlds.

Gary Green, Avid director of cloud and storage product management, has analyzed how The cloud is revolutionizing workflows at Disney accelerating global collaboration, making assets available in real time in the cloud, managing assets across the entire project with cloud orchestration, protecting content in progress, and transparently synchronizing with Nexis Cloud.

Green has highlighted that Avid Edit on Demand Now offers turnkey cloud-based video editing as a service, with accelerated and fully secure media upload and download, up to 30 Media Composer seats and 200TB of Avid Nexis Cloud Storage, and up to 5 concurrent client file transfers.

Avid Connect Live Madrid has closed with a round table moderated by Antonio Castillo, director of Panorama Audiovisual, in which they have participated Gabriel Corbella, Avid Associate Consultant & Trainer; José Luis Gacal, partner of Wonder; y Juan Luis Romero, in charge of the group's post-production area Secuoya.

Among other issues, the profile of multi-purpose professionals who respond to the challenges of new tools that integrate audio and video editing, color correction, etc. has been raised. The rise of the use of multi-camera beyond live, both in OTT services and in narrative language, the cloud and the challenges it poses for security when working with global platforms such as Netflix, remote production and realization or the delivery of OTT content directly from the editor with IMF packaging.