Viz Link Bridges Graphics and Video Workflows, Bringing Still Graphics to Life

By Carolyn Braff
In
the Olympic spirit of bringing the world together, Vizrt is bringing workflows together
through its newest enabling feature, Viz Link. Bridging graphics and video
workflows, Viz Link enables an operator to embed video into graphics for
quick-turnaround on-air images, creating a real-time editing system that syncs
with an existing video archive.
The
idea is relatively simple – make video as available to graphics operators as
images currently are, using the video libraries already stored in a
broadcaster’s asset management system.
“Viz
Link allows for skipping the whole tradition of editing,” explains Petter Ole
Jakobsen, Chief Technology Officer for Vizrt. “I like to call it real-time
editing because it skips the traditional editing route where one person has to
go to an editing room and merge graphics manually before play out. This will be
much richer, too, because the video is embedded into the graphics in one
package.”
Jakobsen
say Vizrt clients have so much content available stored away in video and
graphics systems, but it’s still relatively tedious to get a hold of it and
bring it together in a very fast way during the editing process. “The Viz Link
takes care of that, because suddenly the repertoire of video material in the
large asset management system is now accessible to any graphics template,”
he says.
From
one desktop, the Viz Link interface allows any operator with access to a
character generator and a video hub to access a video storage system, search
for a desired video, preview the video, edit the clip and drop it into a
graphics template or 3D image, all in roughly the same amount of time it would
take to use a still image in its place.
“Control
room operators are still using still photos, mostly because that’s the only
thing you can do with the time frame that you have,” Jakobsen says. “You can
now reduce the time of making a headline which is visually strong, going from
5-10 minutes to maybe 10 seconds. The more traditional editing step just goes
away, and that’s a dramatic change.”
Viz
Link currently supports all of the most common video formats, in both HD and
SD, including DV, DVCPro and IMX, and can operate as an interface between other
Viz products, such as Viz Content Pilot content management, Viz Multichannel
branding and Viz Trio CG software. Before Viz Link can access videos from an
existing asset management system, however, they must be stored in the
customizable Viz Video Hub.
“The
Video Hub comes in a very small size or a very large size, and in the smallest
version it’s more like a clip store or still store inside of the system,”
Jakobsen explains. “Technically it has some of the features of the larger asset
management system, but you do need a place where the videos are stored for easy
access.”