Artear enters the digital era with the launch of a new production center

Artear's new production center features ten studios and a variety of broadcast editing systems, including Adobe Creative Suite and Avid Media Central with Telestream's Vantage-based file processing and encoding.

Art, one of the most important media companies and distributor of multichannel video programming (MVPD) of news and entertainment content in Argentina, has just inaugurated a new content production center of 2,600 square meters.

Center, one of the largest in Latin Americaa, has ten studios and a variety of broadcast editing systems, including Adobe Creative Suite y Avid Media Central.

Owned by the Argentine media conglomerate, Clarín, Artear produces and distributes varied and agile content in Spanish, such as soap operas, contests, news, talent shows...

To compete effectively in the digital age, Artear amanages and distributes nearly a dozen channels in a universe multiplataform covering open television, cable and digital sites, including open channels El Trece (Canal 13 in Buenos Aires), El Doce (Canal 12 in Córdoba), Canal 10 (Channel 10 in Bahía Blanca) and Canal Siete (Channel 7 in Bariloche); the news channel TN (Todo Noticias); Volver, a classic Argentine film cable channel; Ciudad Magazine, with online programming about lifestyles; and the Spanish music channel, Quiero.

The challenge

A fundamental element of these editing environments is the system Vantage Transcode Pro Telestream, what automates file transcoding and processing of media and video content moving in and out of editing, storage and asset management systems.

The Vantage Transcode Pro platform offers an Avid option that seamlessly interfaces with the editing environment Avid. And, to ensure high-quality cross-platform distribution, Artear has also configured its Vantage system with another optional module, the Vantage Transcode Multiscreen, a GPU-accelerated solution to automate adaptive bitrate (ABR) packet creation, essential to serve today's viewers who prefer to watch videos on different connected devices.

With the addition of the Multiscreen component, Artear's Vantage media processing workflow encompasses ingest, transcoding, encryption and delivery of content to CDNs and playout servers. It also supports Apple HLS, Adobe Dynamic Streaming, Microsoft Smooth Streaming, MPEG-DASH, H.264 and H.265 formats as well as MP4 progressive downloads.

The solution

At Artear, José Gabriel Ciccarelli is one of the technicians responsible for maintaining the environment Avid MediaCentral, which is composed of systems of edition Media Composer that interact directly with the asset management system of Avid Interplay production and the Isis shared storage.

As a long-time Avid development partner, Telestream has created Avid Connect, a sophisticated interface that allows its powerful Vantage Transcode Pro media processing platform to seamlessly serve and support Avid MediaCentral's workflow.

Hoy, Vantage automates a wide range of processes media for Artear, including ingesting media from a watch folder directly into Interplay and/or ISIS; conversion between formats, codecs and frame rates; or creating adaptive bitrate packaging for cross-platform distribution.

In addition, it can handle broadcast codecs, such as XDCAM HD 50/35Mbps/ProRes 422 and DNx-HD-120/185/220Mbps, as well as H.264/x264/H.265 and GoPro Cineform.

Allows expansion of media and adding fades in/out and overlays of films and images, in addition to the generation of proxies for archiving

In terms of audio, it offers mixing of audio channels and normalization tasks, such as loudness correction.

Vantage performs these tasks in a way that preserves the metadata that is critical to searching, organizing, categorizing, and tracking content in facility storage and asset management systems.

Artear's Vantage Transcode Pro Workflow Speeds Up Using Four Servers Telestream Lightspeed K80, plus 10 Dell CPU nodes running Vantage.

Artear plans to update its Vantage for better integration with Avid, including the ability to use an Interplay folder as a trigger for Flip actions. In the future, they also hope to replace traditional CPU nodes with Telestream's next-generation Lightspeed servers.

Great flexibility

Artear opted for Vantage due to the flexibility with which users could structure and schedule many different media processing workflows, simply and visually. This means having the flexibility to integrate different workflows in accordance with the unique production and delivery requirements of each broadcast, cable or digital television channel.

To meet all your distribution requirements, including viewing on a variety of home and mobile devices, Artear reuses every video instance it produces in a variety of formats, using the Vantage Transcode Multiscreen workflow to automate the creation of adaptive bitrate (ABR) variants.

Considering the importance of the time factor for news content, Artear's most challenging workflows are related to the voluminous content broadcast on the TN cable news network and its transcoding into formats suitable for use in the website TN.com.ar and international distribution channels.

The workflows associated with El Trece are complex because programs viewed on this main channel must be formatted and reused across all Artear platforms, including broadcast and cable television channels, the digital website eltrece.tv and international distribution.

Among the high-audience premium programs produced by Artear and its production partners for El Trece, Simona (drama), Pasapalabra (contest), Los Ángeles de la Mañana (interviews) and Showmatch (dance talent show) stand out.

José Gabriel Ciccarelli, media workflow and ACSR technician at Artear, acknowledges that “as our operations continue to grow, I can't imagine how we would manage our current media processing workload without Vantage. Vantage ensures that all videos, regardless of codec, format, bitrate or quality, can be ingested into our MediaCentral ecosystem. It also ensures that material exported from our Avids is in the correct format for distribution to all our websites and social networks as quickly as possible.”

“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: providing content to our viewers in the formats they need, where and when they want,” concludes Ciccarelli.

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