Telestream, a provider of digital media tools and workflow solutions, has announced that Arte Radiotelevisivo Argentina SA (Artear) is using Telestream Vantage Transcode Pro to automate the transcoding and processing of media moving into and out of its Avid editing, storage and asset management systems.
Owned by Argentine media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, Artear produces and distributes Spanish-language content, such as episodic dramas, game shows, news, and dance competitions. To compete effectively in the digital era, Artear manages and distributes close to a dozen media brands across a multi-platform universe spanning broadcast, cable, and digital sites.
To better manage its multi-faceted operations, Artear recently opened a new, 28,000 square foot Content Production Center—the largest in Latin America—complete with four studios featuring an Avid MediaCentral post production workflow. A key component to the MediaCentral workflow is a Telestream Vantage Transcode Pro system that automates the transcoding and processing of media moving into and out of the Avid editing, storage and asset management systems.
Artear’s Vantage Transcode Pro workflow is accelerated through the use of four Telestream Lightspeed K80 servers, plus 10 Dell CPU nodes running Vantage. “As our operation grows, I can’t imagine how we would handle our current media processing workload without Vantage,” said José Gabriel Ciccarelli, Avid ASCR, for Artear. “Vantage ensures that all video—regardless of codec, format, bitrate, or quality—can be ingested into our MediaCentral ecosystem. It also ensures that the material exported from our Avids is in the right format for distribution to all of our websites and social networks as quickly as possible.”
To meet all of its distribution requirements—including viewing on a variety of home and mobile devices—Artear needs to repurpose each instance of video that it produces into a variety of formats and adaptive bit rate (ABR) variants. Artear has also configured its Vantage system with Vantage Transcode Multiscreen, a GPU-accelerated solution for creating high-quality ABR packages—a process that optimizes the video content for proper display on all the different connected devices today’s viewers like to use.
Some of Artear’s most challenging workflows are related to transcoding the voluminous content seen on its TN cable news network into the right formats for use on the TN.com.ar website and international distribution channels. “By automating these tasks, we’ve eliminated human error, which is common with repetitive tasks. And with accelerated processing, we’re able to ensure that media files are ready in time for postproduction. With Vantage, we’ve gained valuable time—that’s for sure,” added Ciccarelli.
Today, Vantage automates a wide range of media processes for Artear including:
- Ingesting media from a watch folder directly into Interplay and/or ISIS
- Converting between formats, codecs, and frame rates
- Creating adaptive bitrate packages for multi-platform distribution
- Handling broadcast codecs, such as XDCAM HD 50/35Mbps/ProRes 422 and DNxHD-120/185/220Mbps, as well as H.264/x264/H.265 and GoPro Cineform
- Mixing audio channels and performing normalization tasks, such as loudness correction
- Enabling media expansion, and adding fades in/out and movie and image overlays
- Generating proxies for archive
“Before Vantage, we only needed to ingest about 150 Sony camera files per day into our Avid workflow. But, as the need for digital versions increases, we now rely on Vantage to solve our biggest challenge—getting content to our viewers in the formats they need to watch wherever and whenever they choose,” concluded Ciccarelli.
Alfonso Cuarón and Cate Blanchett Bring “Disclaimer” To Television
"Disclaimer" pulls the rug out from the audience before they've had the chance to get settled.
There's no building of empathy for its central character, Cate Blanchett's Catherine Ravenscroft. There's no luxuriating in her banal every day, at work or in her plush London home with her snobbish husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and directionless, resentful adult son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). All we know at the beginning of the seven-part series, which begins rolling out on Apple TV+ Friday, is that she's an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who is being feted by Christiane Amanpour.
But almost immediately her life starts to spiral when she receives an anonymous, self-published book about a young mother on vacation in Italy with her toddler son that's shockingly familiar. The woman in the book meets a young man who later drowns while trying to save her son. When the police question her, she denies knowing him and returns to London. It's a memory that Catherine has long kept buried and secret but has now emerged in spectacularly embarrassing, reputation-destroying fashion along with a batch of intimate, provocative photos that the young man, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) took the night before.
"Disclaimer" throws you into the fire; And like everyone else in the show, from strangers reading the book to Catherine's husband, you start making assumptions about and judging her. Not even Blanchett was immune reading the script. She wondered: Is this woman awful?
"I was shocked at the layers of judgment that I transposed on the character," Blanchett said. "The challenge and agony of playing a character like this is that the crisis happens as soon as you meet her. We know nothing about her, only what people are saying about her."
Told in seven chapters, the... Read More