BBC News & Current Affairs choose Aston GREEN

BBC News and Current Affairs in London, have ordered five Aston GREEN character generators to provide dynamic captions both around the UK and internationally.
The requirement was driven by the need to have news 'tickers' on permanent display.
News and Current Affairs turned to Aston for an integrated solution, when it also transpired that their dedicated clock generators needed replacing.
The GREENs offer a production saving as well as winning valuable space in the equipment racks, as the units are just 2u high.
The first GREEN is due for installation early in July when it will go into action immediately for News 24. The other units are destined for World Service and the Breakfast news programme, with a fourth unit to be installed in the graphics suite: a pluggable live graphics area that can feed any of the news channels and programmes.
At present the fifth will be a spare, but its powerful text and dynamic capabilities, together with the automation possibilities should ensure it is in frequent service on other news-based graphics projects.
The GREENS will all be used to display a continuous newscrawl, with the headlines loaded automatically from the BBCi website via Aston's free of charge Datapool application.
In addition, each studio can load its own headlines, with the operator entering text into the datapool manually for inclusion at the top of the hour.
The Continuous Crawl function is standard across all of the Aston ViVidrange, which also includes the RED and BLUE character generators. It derives its content either from text manually typed in at the cg keyboard, or across the Ethernet network from a datapool.
Aston supply the Datapool Software Developers Kit with every ViVid unit, and this provides the tools to retrieve, format and display data from remote sources. Data can be accessed in many formats, including html, Excel spreadsheet, MS Word, and Access.
(MM)