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IBIS at Carlton WestCountry
A News Automation Case Study
Although it is rather remote from London, and indeed from other ITV regional centres, Carlton West Country Television is anything but a backwater in news or technology terms.
The region served by West Country from its base outside Plymouth is a large and busy one, and the station produces something in excess of 400 hours of regional and local news programming every year. This includes nightly opt-outs to inject local stories for Barnstaple, Exeter and Truro, and there are also bureaus in Weymouth, Taunton and Penzance.
In technology terms, Carlton West Country has implemented a digital newsroom which is not only highly functional and responsive to local needs, but could also serve as a “best practice” model on how to achieve integration of systems and functions from a variety of manufacturers.
This newsroom uses servers and editing from Quantel; an Autocue QNews newsroom system; and a range of products from IBIS which serve as “glue” to cement the infrastructure together.
“It must be seamless”
From the earliest stages of the project, West Country’s Controller of Engineering Mark Chaplin concentrated on a number of clearly defined goals. He wanted a simple system, suited to the station’s scale, which would be both highly responsive and easy to operate. Picture quality was important (MPEG-50 was chosen as the high-resolution standard) but he also wanted journalists to be able to browse video on the desktop. He particularly wanted to resolve the perennial problem of lost and missing tapes.
Chaplin’s overall goal: “a seamless newsroom,” where journalists would have a single working environment, into which all of the necessary operations would fit.
It was in creating this “seamlessness” that systems and expertise from IBIS proved to be particularly effective.
Something old, something new…
Certain elements of the system were already in place, such as the QNews newsroom system from Autocue, which was already being used for a wide variety of journalistic purposes including scriptwriting, running order management, prompting and automation of video and graphics playout.
The digitisation project called for some major new capabilities: a server-based production environment, non-linear editing, desktop browsing for journalists, and automation of both ingest and playout. All of these had to be fully integrated with the existing newsroom infrastructure.
The eventual vendor choices spread the load between several companies who all provided “best of breed” elements of the solution. The main server-based editing and transmission provider was Quantel, who contributed a production environment built round a Clipbox Power server, configured to store around 50 hours of MPEG-50 material.
This server supports three Quantel embedded edit seats, with a Paintbox and Picturebox on the same network for stills and graphics creation and playout.
The IBIS effect
IBIS components were chosen to work with, around and between the systems from Autocue and Quantel to create Chaplin’s goal of a seamless environment.
The IBIS involvement begins with ingest. Rushes and raw footage are ingested into the Clipbox Power by means of the ServerLoad application. ServerLoad allows both manual and scheduled recording off tape or down the line, and manages, in parallel, the creation of low-resolution MPEG-1 copies of all incoming material onto a 200-hour Browse Server using IPV’s SpectreView technology.
Journalists can view the ingested material on their desktops, using the IBIS ClipTrim application or QNews’s internal browser. However, unlike a simple browser, ClipTrim allows journalists to both view and do cuts-only editing at their workstations, with the results being automatically conformed and made available for voiceover and finishing at a Quantel high-resolution edit seat.
When material has been finished at a Quantel seat, stored back on the ClipBox Power and authorised for transmission, ServerMirror automatically scavenges and creates two more versions: one on the Clipbox Studio transmission server, which stores three hours of MPEG2 and which is used to play material out to air; and another version back in low-res to the IPV Browse Server. This means that journalists can browse finished packages from any of the 25 newsroom workstations as they are writing scripts and creating running orders.
ServerMirror works entirely in the background, and is essentially transparent to users. It manages media behind the scenes to ensure that workflow conditions are met. In this it is like the underlying ServerBase application, which provides core media management capabilities and automatically generates a central reference of all material stored in all locations.
While a media manager uses the ServerBase client to carry out database maintenance and housekeeping, the average journalist in the West Country newsroom is largely or completely unaware that IBIS software is working away all the time to ensure the availability and integrity of media in the system.
Playout to air is from the Clipbox Studio under the control of the Autocue Q-News automation system, which also controls playout of captions, generates text for subtitles and closed captioning, and provides prompting.
As a backup to the Clipbox Studio and the Q-News automation, material can also be played out to air directly from the Clipbox Power, under IBIS ServerPlay transmission control, but with the playlist still derived directly from the Q-News running order.
You can’t see the joins
What is remarkable about the West Country newsroom is the degree and nature of the integration. It is almost impossible, when following the journalists’ workflow, to see the joins between systems and applications.
Journalists use a single workstation for all newsroom, ingest, browsing, shotlisting, running order and transmission purposes, and while high-resolution finishing is done at a Quantel editing seat, total integration between the source material is preserved whatever the resolution. A key feature for the journalists is that they can enter the name or of a clip they want to ingest once, and the entire ensuing process, involving elements from IBIS, Autocue, IPV and Quantel, picks up on that unique name without any necessity at any stage to rekey. The story name is associated with a “techcode” which uniquely identifies the allied media elements. This procedure eliminates a major source of error and promotes greatly enhanced efficiency in the production cycle.
The system also generates content for the Carlton West Country website, with an automatic conversion of chosen material from the IPV MPEG1 server to Real Video at web resolution. In addition it links in the seven regional sites and also reporters out on the road, who can dial in using laptop computers and mobile phones.
West Country have also developed their own archiving system, which is fully integrated with the IBIS/Quantel/Autocue environment.
The workflow machine
Crucial to the very evident success of the Carlton West Country installation has been the ability of the IBIS components to integrate both existing and new elements to make a smooth and seamless whole. In fact the working relationship between all of the major suppliers has been extremely close and productive.
“The West Country installation,” says IBIS Marketing Director Andrew Winter, “illustrates very well how IBIS provides both crucial user functions, such as ingest management and desktop editing, and background capabilities which users hardly ever see but which are just as crucial to the overall operation.”
For Mark Chaplin the system’s benefits are clear: “It’s all about driving the workflow,” he says. “From ingest to production to transmission to archive, the system is a single workflow machine, and IBIS has played an important role in making it that way.”
He is happy that the system provides the functions his journalists and production staff need, but remains simple to operate and use. High quality output is combined with desktop browsing and editing.
Journalists never see tapes after they hand them into the ingest station, so they never lose them, but can browse any and all of the material available both before and after editing.
And best of all, his dreamed-of “seamless newsroom” is now a reality.