Prepress
Viz Content Pilot
Friday 23. January 2009 - The template graphics solutions for journalists to add live graphics to their stories
Independent content creation
Viz Content Pilot offers the optimal environment to create, manage, and deliver high volumes of top-quality content. It supports live and taped news, sports, election, and other broadcast productions.
By using a variety of template forms, the editorial staff can enter new data, images or videos in pre-defined graphic animations, and preview the end result instantaneously. Therefore, day-to-day content creation can be totally independent from the design department.
Playlist management
Updating and playing out a playlist can be achieved automatically or manually. Viz Content Pilot includes a powerful multi-user playlist with real-time updates allowing multiple producers to update the playlist simultaneously.
The playlist can also be automatically synchronized with a variety of applications, such as newsroom systems or Viz Trio.
Viz Content Pilot includes full support for the revolutionary Look-Ahead Transition Logic. Transitions between graphics are triggered automatically using a single video output channel. This enables seamless and automatic transitions between multiple layers of graphics.
Concepts and Variants
Viz Content Pilot supports Concept and Variant enabled playlists. Concepts can be understood as branding styles, and are used to define the theme of a playlist. For example, Music or Sports or the Six OClock News versus the Nine OClock News.
To further enhance the usability of Concepts, Viz Content Pilot also supports Variants of graphics. These allow the producer to switch Variants of a scene on the fly, even right before the graphics are aired.
Templates as custom applications
Template designers can create small applications, using drag-and-drop operations, scripts, and macro commands. These applications can access and process external data, trigger any kind of custom logic, and update the Viz Media Sequencer. With good usability design, designers can create templates that exactly fit the needs of journalists. Templates can be used to create custom-made applications that control Viz Content Pilots features.
Media Asset Management
Viz Object Store provides a shared database of video clips and stills, which can be accessed from all Vizrt applications at any stage of the production process. By enabling Viz Content Pilot with Viz Link, and combining it with Vizrts own Media Asset Management system (Viz Ardome and Viz Video Hub), it is now possible to add video to graphics. Using Viz EasyCut or Viz PreCut, journalists can edit video clips, save them back to Viz Video Hub, then add them to the story, either as video or as video in graphics. For last-minute editing, video clips, images, and text can also be edited by the Viz Content Pilot operator.
Viz Link enabled
The Viz Link enabled workflow empowers journalists when creating a story. It allows them to add graphics templates to their stories and fill out these templates with video files from the Viz Video Hub. Graphic designers can pre-define different templates in Viz Artist and the journalist can then choose between the available layouts before adding them to a story; without ever leaving the familiar newsroom system. Headlines and additional text can also be added to the template and the combined video and graphics can instantly be previewed inside the ActiveX.
Newsroom Integration
Viz Content Pilot easily integrates into the editorial workflow as the templates can be accessed by any major newsroom system. The Newsroom Connect Component is a small, but advanced, graphics editing tool. It enables journalists to add images, text, videos, and maps, and to select the graphics Concept and Variant. It also supports a real-time preview and snapshots. For time-critical situations, the Quick CG command line tool allows the user to create graphics with text on the fly.
NLE Integration
With the Viz NLE Plug-in, graphics templates can be used within the non-linear editing system without any modifications.
All the standard Viz Content Pilot controls and features are available within the non-linear editing system. The plug-in window includes a real-time preview of the graphic, including full length animation. Once the template is validated, the graphic will be rendered into the timeline.
Viz Content Pilot supports the NLE systems by Avid and Quantel, as well as Apples FinalCut Pro.
Some advanced features, such as Transition Logic scenes, scenes with sound effects, and stop point control are currently only supported in the live version of Viz Content Pilot.
Key Features
Support for Concept and Variant-enabled playlists
Advanced newsroom integration with all major newsroom systems
Integration with all major automation systems
Integration of a mapping system for adding high-resolution custom maps with style definitions
Full integration of video in graphics during template design, template filling, and playout
Access to previews in real-time or as snapshots
Template driven graphics with a completely customizable interface
Built-in macro commands and scripting logic
Full Unicode support, including languages that use complex scripts
Transition Logic with Look-Ahead preview
Customizable real-time playlist with snapshot icons of templates and videos
Runs on top of a powerful enterprise level Oracle database that supports up to 100,000 users