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Advanced Graphics Automation

By - June 5, 2020
Advanced Graphics Automation

Graphics is an inalienable aspect of television experience that helps package content segments to make channel programming look delightful to the eyes of the viewers. All graphic elements in a video stream are an integral part of content ingest and needs to be rendered in broadcast grade quality. There are many forms of advanced graphics and each one of them has a purpose of its own. Be it a channel logo, a bug or a lower-third, various types of advanced graphics are inserted into video streams to give viewers a look into coming up programs, ad-breaks, promotional teasers, etc.

Amagi CLOUDPORT supports multi-layered graphics rendering with a high level of automation to simplify the graphics playout in a video stream. Rich animated graphic sequences can be played out as static, or template-driven, rule-based graphics using CLOUDPORT graphics ingest and automated scheduling function. Amagi CLOUDPORT is the most versatile platform to playout static as well as dynamic graphic sequences. Advanced graphic capabilities offered by CLOUDPORT enables TV networks to achieve multi-layered graphics capabilities to provide best viewing experience to the users.

CLOUDPORT supports static graphics or animated sequences, time-based graphics like a channel bumper, advanced dynamic graphics including full screen NOW / NEXT / LATER, ‘Back in’ counter and countdown timers. CLOUDPORT also supports advanced graphics or digital video effects (DVE) which are commonly used for promotional purposes and can be automated using Adobe After Effect templates. These graphics can be played out with embedded video or images with Picture-in-Picture (PIP) effect with L-band, Lowe-Thirds band and credit squeeze being a few examples of advanced graphics supported by CLOUDPORT.

Apart from all the conventional graphics animations supported by Adobe After-effects rendered templates, CLOUDPORT now supports native graphics animations and renders them directly on the playout engine. All the native graphics animations in this case are processed by the playout engine in the form of dynamic data and rendered in real-time inside the playout engine. This new update to CLOUDPORT playout platform is apt for rendering and distributing live channels carrying multiple sports events, news, and other live events across the globe.

As AEP (adobe after-effects) templates do not solve for the real-time graphic needs of live events playout and distribution, COUDPORT – NG, the all new graphics subsystem for CLOUDPORT playout engine, renders HTML and dynamic graphics templates in real-time on the player itself. This enables creating dynamic real-time sports scorecards, news and stock tickers, weather updates, count-down timers, clocks, and multiple other sophisticated parameters-driven graphics rendering and overlay on the player.

There are three key components of CLOUDPORT – NG subsystem:

  • GDL - Graphics description language helps describe graphics template and inputs the parameters for dynamic rendering on the player
  • CLOUDPORT automation provides input parameters to the graphics elements with ‘playlist edit’, ‘playout controls’ and ‘live controls’
  • CLOUDPORT player uses an embedded chrome module to render parsed GDL file in HTML format. This chrome module can render complex HTML with JavaScript, SVG implementations with the ability to connect to dynamic input sources which is then composed on top of the video with full alpha and multi-layered support.

CLOUDPORT – NG supports the following graphics templates, among others:

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Amagi CLOUDPORT playout engine automates multi-layered advanced graphics for both programmed channels and live events like sports, news, etc. Amagi CLOUDPORT comes with a web based unified management interface that provides a seamless, simple, and easy way to manage playlists and advanced graphics schedule.

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