Maintaining a competitive edge
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM
News automation
Crispin recently has enhanced its NewsCat automated cataloging system to help stations transition existing tape archives to digital files on spinning disk.
If file-based workflows are providing the vehicle to drive greater newsroom efficiency, newsroom automation systems are the automatic transmission of the process. Sure, you can get where you're going without it, but the journey's so much more enjoyable when you have it.
News automation takes many forms, but the consistent thread that ties these automation systems is the reliance of technology to simplify labor-intensive tasks. When it comes to automating control of news production, Ross Video has responded with OverDrive.
“What OverDrive does is bring that traditional control panel from a production switcher and format that onto a graphical user interface that is timeline-based,” explains Darren Budrow, Ross Video director of sales.
The production switcher doesn't go away and remains the nerve center communicating with external devices, but OverDrive replaces buttons and fader handles with a simpler interface. In some respects, OverDrive is similar to a master control automation system. It will look at the playout server and inform a technical director with a graphical warning if a clip is unavailable. It also lets operators add, remove or rearrange items in the rundown on the fly.
“The whole focus of this is being able to do this in a live environment, where breaking news is literally happening all around you,” Budrow says.
Currently, OverDrive can interface with the Avid iNews or AP's ENPS newsroom computer systems via MOS, so rundowns can be published directly to the controller and operators can view them on the OverDrive timeline.
Elsewhere, automation is assisting newsrooms with archiving stories for convenient retrieval after the newscast airs. For the past few years, Crispin has answered this need with its NewsCat product.
“What we've done is integrate an interface to the newsroom computer systems that have already defined that clip, and we have databased all of the attributes associated with the news clip,” explains Alan DeVany, company founder and president. “We've done that in a way to provide a very simple search tool via a Web interface anywhere on the network with just a click of a mouse.”
Recently, the company has added an extension to NewsCat to help stations ingest and catalog their shelves full of archived videotape.
“To find something older than what we've had an interface to, all of a sudden we have much less descriptive information about that held in our database,” DeVany says. “We have designed a tool to allow stations to pull a tape, dump it into the system and then archive it. We create a low-res proxy of that as we do for all of our news clips, and anywhere on the network we can allow for anybody to continue to add descriptors about that video that they see to a common searchable database.”
Fade to black
There was a time when a station wanted to remain competitive with the station down the street. File-based workflows and automation helped them cut costs, increase efficiency and produce a better product so they could do just that.
Today, a station doesn't just compete with its cross-town rival. Technologies like the Internet have seen to that. Broadcast news operations are at the dawn of a new competitive reality in which every media outlet is a potential competitor. Maintaining and improving upon efficiencies realized through adoption of file-based workflows and news automation will be critical to their success in this hotly contested news environment.
| Want to use this article? Click here for options! |  |
