TV2 Norway, one of the nation’s largest commercial TV stations, employed a customized Vizrt package to power graphics and manage incoming data during recent community election coverage.
TV2 relied on Viz|Content Pilot content management and Viz|Artist 3.1 2-D/3-D real-time animation and visual effects software to produce a sophisticated look for presentation of election results coverage.
According to TV2 director of news and feature production Peter Ocskay, the station’s mission for election coverage was to present results from 400 communities in a way that was easy for viewers to understand. Vizrt software helped the station’s anchor take charge as a storyteller throughout the whole evening, he said.
The live coverage lasted for 16 hours. TV2 used an interactive touch screen to display each updated poll number as it came in. Using maps, figures and various party-specific icons, the show host could pinpoint the polling place, go to the live report, take in the information and assimilate it into the graphics in real time. As the coverage began, TV2 decided to highlight 65 communities and pinpoint developments there. As the night progressed, the show producers and graphics artists employed the Vizrt software workflows and graphics generators to add an additional 20 communities to the overall voting picture.
The sheer volume of data and images requiring management during TV2’s marathon coverage of the 2007 local elections required a high-powered rendering engine and an organized workflow. More than 2 million voters cast their ballots to determine the political leadership of Norway’s townships and counties for the next four years. TV2’s coverage also included live reports from 24 different locations and offered real-time updates on the latest polling figures as they occurred. TV2 used Vizrt’s rendering engine, Viz|Engine, to control text and image editing as well as to make changes in real time to all graphic elements and animation effects during the election coverage.
For more information, visit www.vizrt.com.