Perfect Partnership For Rio

At NAB this year, Avid announced that ContentAgent, the workflow management and automation tool from ROOT6 Technology, was a recognised Avid Platform Certified solution, providing customers with the peace of mind through assured connectivity and compatibility with Avid ecosystems.

For some years now, ContentAgent has served an important role for both broadcasters and post facilities, automating ingest into Avid environments from all types of media including camera cards, to free up both staff and editing systems for more productive tasks.

At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio both the BBC and Spanish state broadcaster RTVE are using ContentAgent to ingest into Avid Interlay PAM environments. Here, footage from the Olympic venues and camera card media will be transcoded into various Avid formats for editing and archiving. Both broadcasters are also using ContentAgent's advanced frame rate conversion as part of the ingest workflow – facilitated by integration with the popular Tachyon software from Cinnafilm. This will deliver motion compensated HD clips from 60i to 50i and 50i to 60i.

In Rio, the BBC is also using six CardAgent systems to enable automated ingest and job preparation; the broadcaster already has considerable experience with the system, having deployed multiple ContentAgents at the 2014 FIFA World Cup. At the tournament BBC Sport converted over 3,500 separate clips totalling nearly 8 TB of media for use in editing. ContentAgent was also used to convert a further 37TB of media during the event so it could be added directly the BBC Sport Archive in Salford.

In another recent application, Timeline Television, the managed service provider for BT Sport, has purchased its third ContentAgent workflow management and automation system from ROOT6 Technology for use in a new BT Sport compliance workflow based on Reach Engine, the context-driven asset management system from Levels Beyond.

ContentAgent, with two JobAgents, will be used within the workflow to automate a variety of tasks including QC and transcoding into various formats for Avid editorial and viewing. The JobAgents – external processing engines for parallel processing – accelerate image and format processing tasks using multi-core CPUs and GPUs to provide very fast high quality results. The system will enable sports programming from leading independent providers including Sunset + Vine and Red Bull to be normalised to BT Sport house standards. Both manual and automated QC processes determine that content is appropriate and that technical parameters such as those relating to flashing and audio levels, for example, are compliant.

In the U.S. Prometheus Entertainment, a leading supplier of critically acclaimed, highly rated programming to the U.S. cable TV market, has deployed ContentAgent from ROOT6 Technology to streamline its Avid-based editorial operations by managing and automating complex ingest and framerate conversion workflows.

As Greg Cohan, VP of Post Production puts it: "In summary I'd say ContentAgent complements our current workflow by taking large aspects of daily operations and automating them off system, freeing up the Assistant Editors and Avid systems to work forward while ContentAgent does the processing in the background. We'd looked at several products that ingested to ISIS, but what ultimately tipped the scale for us on ContentAgent was that it felt set up for a holistic Avid environment."

Owen Walker, Head of Product Management at ROOT6 Technology, concluded: "Many of our customers throughout the world have benefited from ContentAgent's timesaving advantages in Avid environments so it was important for us to join the Avid Alliance Partner Program. As a member of the program, we have access to the resources needed to provide seamless media workflow integration into the Avid ecosystem. ContentAgent is now available through the Avid sales and channel network, simplifying customers' buying experience."

Visitors to IBC will be able to experience the latest iteration of ContentAgent at Hall 7.E21.

Image: ContentAgent will be in use in Rio this summer.

www.root6technology.com

(JP/CD)