Sinclair Broadcast Group is deploying what it calls “innovative cloud-based news and content gathering and production workflows” by combining technologies from Avid, Sony and Marquis Broadcast, the TV station owner said on Wednesday.
The approach leverages 5G networks to enrich the flow of news metadata, which can accelerate the speed of its news operations.
Ernie Ensign, Asst. VP of News Technology & Operations at Sinclair, said, “Our fundamental strategy is to democratize news acquisition, with every journalist or photographer having fast content delivery to news production centers. This transformation requires a collaborative approach to streamline the workflow.”
That’s why Sinclair engaged with Avid on its MediaCentra news production platform, Sony on cameras and C3 Portal and Marquis to enable complex workflow integrations.
Ensign continued, “We’ve enabled real business and operational benefits, with fast story turn-around and structured metadata automatically delivered to newsrooms. Our newsrooms can cut several versions of the same story to deliver to digital platforms faster and with improved relevance. We have six stations engaged to refine the technologies and we’re continually optimizing workflows for best ROI and operational outcome. There are challenges to overcome but we’re moving closer to having access to all content in near real time. The next steps are around compression efficiency to increase quality while reducing bandwidth consumption and improving metadata transparency throughout the process.”
Sony’s C3 Portal supports pushing metadata to the camera before shooting commences; for example, iNEWS slug information and assignment data, preserving this metadata throughout the production process when the story checks into Avid MediaCentral.
Future workflows will allow rights information – and therefore genealogy – to be automatically maintained from creation throughout the edit and into archive.
“The pressure to deliver content and get editors cutting faster is relentless, and the focus of Avid’s partnership with Sony and Marquis is to pioneer new ways to quickly ingest proxy media with metadata and fetch only the required high-resolution media in a sequence,” said Ray Thompson, Senior Director of Partners and Alliances at Avid. “The combined offering enables lens-to-first-edit workflows to flow from Sony cameras, through Sony’s C3 Portal leveraging Marquis software to deliver proxy media and camera metadata into Avid on-premises or cloud-deployed production solutions. This includes sending content into Avid Production Asset Management environments to simplify news and sports workflows or sending content directly into the Avid | Edit On Demand SaaS platform in the cloud.”
With this sequence data, Marquis will automatically retrieve the high-resolution media from either Sony’s C3 Portal, and also the originating camera or originating camera cards.
Assuming a 10:1 shooting ratio, this partial extraction process results in a 90% reduction in 5G data transferred and network bandwidth required. Using the dynamic relink feature in Avid, the high-res content simply drops into the timeline and automatically substitutes the low-res content, thus transforming news production.
