Playout Automation

wTVision offers TV Pasiones an End-to-End Playout Automation SolutionJuly 12, 2012

TV Pasiones chose wTVision’s Automation System, ChannelMaker, to be the basis of its Playout Automation Workflow. TV Pasiones is a multicultural channel that reaches North and South America, in Spanish, during 24 hours, 7 days a week.   This project highlights some of the latest ChannelMaker Suite Products. ChannelMaker is not only a single product but a full suite of applications that seamlessly work together to provide optimized workflows for each channel's requirements. With ChannelMaker Sequencer, the client manages the day-to-day playlists which ChannelMaker Playout then uses to control wTVision Media Playout Server which in turn is ultimately responsible for getting the content on-air. To further guarantee a flawless operation, a set of additional tools is also part of the ChannelMaker suite of apps. wTVision Media Checker makes sure videos are in-place before their time to be aired comes and Media Validator guarantees the content is valid and is the expected duration to detect media corruption problems and inconsistencies before they can cause havoc on-air. If problems do arise, they get reported by wTVision Media Checker and wTVision Media Validator and that's where wTVision's wTvision Media Transfer Manager comes into play. Content is searched in NearLine Storage or other network locations and can be copied automatically to one or many playout servers with enough time to make the crucial deadline. If media cannot be found the user is alerted to an unresolvable issue in the playlist to be fixed manually. A final part of this workflow (which is really the start) is wTVision Media Ingester, which takes multiple inputs, preview's them, allows for audio levelling and finally ingest's them as playable file-based media. This can be made manually or automatically and with multiple inputs from multiple sources simultaneously. Videos can also be trimmed in multiple part segments with TrimApplication. Instead of clipping and trimming massive video files and having to re-save them to disk, Trim virtualizes this process making a multi-segment clip available to playout in mere seconds.