From The NAB Exhibit Floor: Vizrt

Vizrt | Booth SL2417 | Website: www.vizrt.com

On Monday, Vizrt released a number of announcements at the NAB Show. They include:

Augmented reality graphics

At NAB, Vizrt will present AR graphics during a live studio presentation that will demonstrate how media companies can easily add AR content to any live production without the need of a chromakey wall. The AR graphics will include data-driven election content powered by the Astuce US Election Data Platform module developed and integrated in Vizrt by AstuceMedia and designed by the Al Jazeera America Creative team as well as interactive graphics controlled by the presenter.

To display the AR graphics, Vizrt will use a camera on Shotoku’s new Virtual Studio pedestal and a hand-held camera featuring tracking from Ncam. The tracking data from both systems allows Vizrt’s Viz Virtual Studio to place AR graphics on the set, tracked with realistic movement.

The AR graphics will be interactive allowing the presenter to physically move around in the studio using the Motion Analysis optical CamTrak system. An 84 inch Christie® FHQ842-T touch screen will also be part of the studio presentation allowing the presenter to control AR graphics through the touch interface, as well as trigger transitions. 

Vizrt’s live studio presentation will feature a 7.2 meter LED video wall from Leyard. The video wall will display a virtual window which acts as an extension to the real studio space by creating a perspectively correct representation of the background based on camera position. This capability adds depth to the physical studio for displaying virtual graphics.

The video wall will be driven by Viz Engine running on a specialized version of BOXX Technologies’ all new APEXX 5R, a 3U, rack-mounted workstation that includes liquid cooling, a 2000W redundant power supply, and in this case four NVIDIA M6000 graphics

Automated multi-platform production

Vizrt will show a unique workflow that integrates studio automation and MAM to automatically generate multi-platform content. This workflow allows staff to focus on the live production, while the multi-platform content is generated automatically. Stories played out from Vizrt`s studio automation systems, are automatically prepared for online and mobile devices with custom graphics that accurately scale to fit any sized screen.

Vizrt will show the new version of Viz Opus, which provides a studio automation system, real-time graphics, video playout and video switching capabilities — all in a single-box solution. Viz Opus now features a new user interface with configurable touch areas that can be used for assigning inputs and automation templates displayed as custom icons.

Using the new Showmaker application, operators or journalists can build and amend rundowns and rundown elements within Vizrt’s studio automation systems. With Showmaker, producers can script stories and edit graphics templates and videos through a highly intuitive interface. The tool also integrates with Viz Pilot, allowing producers to easily access graphics templates and search video files in Viz One to add to show rundowns.

Election Night graphics

Vizrt is introducing a new “Election Night” package that allows broadcasters to take real-time polling and voting data and easily turn it into compelling on-screen election graphics. The package helps viewers at home get a better understanding of the election results.

The Election Night package allows broadcasters to create highly interactive election presentations giving the anchor easy-to-use storytelling tools. This content can be integrated with existing Vizrt graphics workflows, allowing broadcasters to use their current technology, with the addition of the incoming data, to tell the election story. The Election Night package can also be used standalone for broadcasters that need a single system for live news coverage. 

The package provides an automated way to gather and display polling and voting results in real time, using a combination of Vizrt’s proven data aggregation tools that are part of the Social TV Solution. This fully integrated single box solution offers the ability for broadcasters to automatically ingest the subscription feeds from multiple election data providers (e.g., AP election data, RSS feeds, etc.) and visualize them using 3D graphics.

The templates included in the Election Night package can be customized to a broadcaster’s specific branding and provide designs for supporting an interactive election map for Presidential, Congressional, Senate, and Governor race coverage. The package also enables broadcasters to ingest, manage and display viewer-generated social media posts.

Smarter workflows with MAM and metadata

Vizrt is showcasing new innovations in its Media Asset Management (MAM) system Viz One. These improvements will allow for increased production efficiency, improved media support through a non-burnt in Meta-graphics workflow, smarter search interfaces and automatic VOD publishing.

Vizrt will present the latest improvements to core media handling that include saving storage with H.264 for production and much faster editing of Apple ProRes video in large video archives using new partial restore functionality. Other improvements include new versions of Vizrt’s proxy tools and simplified infrastructure planning with OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) integration.

Attendees will also see a technical preview of transcoding high quality video with different graphics adapted to multiple channels and resolutions, using NVIDIA hardware acceleration and MPEG­-DASH.

Viz One’s built-in Meta-graphics workflow, enables the journalists to change their graphic content right up to on air time – direct from their desktop. This powerful workflow saves time and enables the production of high-quality graphics and separate versions of content  for the web.

New to Viz One is the ability to search for several types of metadata in a single interface. With this enhancement, producers and editors can now find and edit material significantly faster. It also increases media reuse since all users can easily search across all assets. Viz One’s search function can now use metadata from a specific program and series, as well as time-based log data from, for example, an OPTA Sports Feed.

New at this year’s NAB show, Vizrt will also demonstrate an instant VOD publishing workflow which enables the simple creation of multiple online versions of content from a live broadcast using Vizrt automation systems. In just a few clicks producers can preview and choose which parts of the broadcast they wish to publish. This automated workflow improves the efficiency of studio productions publishing online content and allows a single producer to quickly upload significantly more videos. Viz One stores all metadata from the broadcast and provides the production and transcoding tools to create these online versions.

Also new at the show will be the latest version of Logger, which now enables for the production of even more robust, metadata-based transmission versions of a program with accompanying segmentation, dubbing and subtitles. Significantly, this workflow avoids any media  duplication and requires no additional edits in a non-linear editor. This saves storage space and time, as operators no longer need to wait for media to render or resources to become available.

The new Viz One HTML panel for Adobe Premiere CC accelerates the recall, playback and rendering of media. Using Adobe Media Encoder, the new version achieves significantly faster turnaround time and immediately begins storing media on Viz One during rendering. When used together with online editing workflows and SAN storage in the Viz Engine, this integration provides customers with an extremely fast end-to-end solution for editing and playout.

A new software development kit for Viz One is now available for customers and third parties. The SDK enables rapid integration to existing and future systems using our REST API. We will also show new development tools towards our workflow processes.

To see all of TVNewsCheck’s NAB 2016 coverage, click here.