Vizrt Looks Ahead at Live Broadcast Production

Digital Media World talked to RV Krishnan, Vizrt Vice President of Graphics for the APAC region and General Manager of Vizrt Australia Richard Hewitt about some of the biggest media innovations that will change live production over the next several years, including automation, cloud production, IP distribution, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

We wanted to find out how Vizrt is using these innovations in products for news, sports and entertainment production.

Originally published by Digital Media World

Journalist-driven WorkflowsStorytelling will always be the most important part of journalism. What is evolving is how journalists tell their news stories and where audiences experience them. Richard Hewitt and RV Krishnan talked about cloud-based story techniques at Vizrt that have the potential to shift newsroom production toward workflows driven by journalists who need to reach audiences on all platforms.

Journalist-driven workflows give journalists a chance to be more creative as well as work faster, and take over the delivery of complete stories from any location, using cloud systems to store and access content, and software that can search, find and re-purpose content for different destinations.

Vizrts tools already give journalists ways to use data visually - for instance, they use Vizrts election graphics software to control live visualisations of the statistics they are reporting on in various ways. But the idea of creating once and distributing across many platforms is powerful for a journalist. They can now re-purpose existing video content in custom resolutions and formats, add Vizrt 3D graphics and publish their stories online to social media, VOD platforms or websites.

Viz Story is a relatively new application that puts looks and presentation as well as content under the control of the journalist, instead of relying on a dedicated graphics team. It can also adapt finished content to different devices and destinations. Viz Story suits online breaking news because it only takes a few minutes to make news stories available for multi-platform publishing. It uses templates, an approach Vizrt uses in several of its applications, as a quick way for journalists to add Text On Video (TOV) content for social media sites, while controlling the look and style. All added graphics are then rendered in real-time.

RV Krishnan said, Cloud systems are very useful in this context for making tools and data available and as a vehicle for delivering stories, although its important to remember that the cloud is still in a transition stage in terms of how it can be used. Much more development in the cloud will continue to unfold.

Open PlatformHe also commented on the open platform behind all of Vizrts products and their compatibility with HTML. Vizrts software was originally designed this way to make sure it could be integrated with existing newsroom computer automation systems. Now, HTML has become the basis for web production, stories and graphics, he said. All tools have the same foundation and exist on the one platform. You could run the entire Vizrt platform through the browser for field editing if required.

Viz One asset management software, for example, has an embedded HTML video player that supports web-based production, with frame accurate editing functions. Viz Story was also built on this open platform, which will allow the progressive evolution of its software components. Vizrt products are designed to work with content management systems, CDNs and legacy and future online publishing tools.

Vizrt are software developers, before any of the other specialities the company now has, RV Krishnan said. All products are based on the Viz Engine real-time graphics rendering engine, compositing platform and video server, Viz One media asset management system and Viz Artist, a real-time 3D graphics, modelling and animation tool and broadcast production designer.

Richard commented that the fact that, since April 2018, Viz Artist itself is a free tool, gives scope for a wider range of users - journalists in particular - to learn how to use it to suit their applications. It is the core software Vizrt artists use to build basic geometry and create fonts for their lower third graphics, construct virtual sets and design custom 3D animations.

Its functionality includes global illumination, native support for Substance materials, Cinema 4D LiveLink, and files from all the major 3D modelling applications, and it also supports using video inside the creation process - that is, videos can be used as part of a scene, or as textures mapped on geometry via UV coordinates. Viz Artist is able to integrate clips of any resolution or live stream video as part of the scene design.

Openness comes through Viz Artists scripting capabilities for scene logic, and the ability to write custom plugins to solve a specific challenge in a workflow. As part of the Vizrt integrated workflow, designers design scenes in Viz Artist and make them accessible as templates in other Vizrt applications for journalists and production staff creating online stories.

Flexibility and Agility in BroadcastFlexibility and agility in broadcast are not new themes but are continuing to gain importance, partly because standards are still in progress. RV Krishnan said that standards are, and will be, as critical as ever, but he also sees a lot of caution in the industry regarding standards. Although IP distribution looks set to become, over time, the primary means of broadcasting video, for now broadcasters need to build infrastructures that IP stream video and graphics in any format, while producing a SDI signal for on-air use at the same time.

IP-based Viz Engine composites graphics and video in formats such as MPEG-2 at, for example, 1080i/25, 1080i/29.97, 1080p/30, 720p/50 and others for online, mobile and liv

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