Newsroom operations can be unpredictable; very often breaking news, corrections, footage of better quality can arrive minutes away from a news bulletin’s start. A video editor cannot complete his/her project or render the file in time – and the director has no choice but to break the technological guidelines, switch the NLE station’s output to program and play out the incomplete project from the NLE’s timeline. These actions bring mistakes, reduce the perceived quality of the broadcasters’ content and cause a lot of stress for the control room team.
To avoid this kind of situations, we’ve introduced a new fast timeline playout workflow in the News edition of AutoPlay 7.11 (with the NewsHouse and NewsBase add-ons):
The video editor uses the NewsBase NLE module, working with clips from the AutoPlay MAM. If a version of the project is required to go on-air immediately, he/she starts the “Export to AutoPlay block” action, specifying the new block’s name, it’s category and whether to export the entire timeline or just the current selection. A new block is created in AutoPlay’s database, and the news editor adds it to the on-air playlist. The mediafiles for the clips used in the project at this moment start copying from production storage to the videoserver arrays. No rendering, cutting or creating of new files takes place, which in real-life conditions allows to put the project on-air quickly and reliably. There’s no need to change the priorities of rendering and copying jobs, add external sources to the on-air playlist, switch the signal routing etc, everything is done according to the guidelines, safely and easily. And by the time the next bulletin goes on-air, the video editor will have completed his project and rendered a new clip in the usual way, for use in this and future rundowns.
