Production and multi-channel distribution of news

Abstract

News production is characterised by complex and dynamic workflows as it is important to produce and distribute news as soon as possible and in an audiovisual quality as good as possible. In this paper, we present news production as it has been implemented at the Flemish Radio and Television (Vlaamse radio en televisie, VRT). Driven by the dynamic nature of news content, the VRT news department is optimized for short cycle times and characterised by a highly parallel production process, i.e. product engineering (news bulletin composition or "organise" and story-editing or "construct message"), various material procurement ("create media asset") processes, mastering ("publish"), and the distribution processes largely run in parallel. The formal expression of news operations in terms of canonical processes has allowed us to disambiguate the overall process, and it will help us developing meaningful and reusable interfaces

A content-aware tool for converting videos to narrower aspect ratios

“…In the entire video production workfow, video editing is a part of the post-production process [23,25], which is done after the media assets have been created via flming or acquisition from other sources. Mannens et al [23] described multichannel distribution of news in which material-editing or mastering took place after raw media assets has been acquired. This work Mannens et al [23], done in 2008, naturally did not explore further for distributing videos for mobile phones.…”

“…Mannens et al [23] described multichannel distribution of news in which material-editing or mastering took place after raw media assets has been acquired. This work Mannens et al [23], done in 2008, naturally did not explore further for distributing videos for mobile phones. In the same paper, adjusting the content of multichannel distribution also took place as a part of the postproduction process.…”

Enabling Semantic Search in a News Production Environment

“…An archivist who has been given the task to archive a news broadcast retrieves the rundown of the news broadcast from iNEWS and then searches for the corresponding media fragments in the MAM (label (12) in Fig. 1).…”

“…This is also the case within a news production environment, where professional archive users spend considerable amounts of time searching in the media archive in order to find useful media for reuse in news broadcasts [14]. However, in a news production environment, where it is important to produce and distribute news as soon as possible to as many channels as possible, in an audiovisual quality as good as possible [9], metadata generation is often reduced to an absolute minimum [12]. Consequently, dedicated archivists are responsible for the generation of high quality metadata as a last step in the news production chain in order to facilitate efficient media retrieval.…”

Automatic metadata enrichment in news production

“…Crossfunctional and configurable content [1], cleverly engineered to scale from a three inch screen up to high definition, will gracefully complement current uni-size news television and radio programmes. Eventually, mechanized and sequential news manufacturing methods will be more and more often complemented by scalable, configurable, and agile methods [2] capable of supporting exactly the window of interactivity desired by the end-user [3]. The latest multimedia news stories can be personalized for the consumers and presented within a broader historical context using enhanced semantics [4].…”