Vizrt digitizes newspaper review segment for sky italia

Vizrt’s
graphics software now powers a paperless newspaper review segment during Sky
Italia’s 24-hour news channel, Sky TG24. The anchor of ‘I Giornale di Oggi’
browses the morning’s press articles with a touchscreen application, which,
according to users and viewers alike, is a marked improvement on watching the
anchor read through a stack of newspapers.

The Special
Projects team at TG24 came up with the idea of digitizing the newspaper review
while retaining the ‘hands on’ approach of the existing segment. The anchor
selects thumbnails of newspaper pages, dragging them to an ‘active’ work area
on a high-definition touchscreen. Headlines, photographs, and finely-printed
words and phrases are then centered, scaled and highlighted. Several external
cameras capture the screen’s HD quality, while the content of the active area
is fed concurrently in standard definition directly to the switcher.

Pat
McGuinness , Manager of Special Projects at Sky Italia’s news and weather
channels, said, “We chose Vizrt’s Viz|Artist 3.1 animation platform for our
project because of its power and flexibility. Viz|Artist impresses me as an
application-builder for which your imagination is the only real limit. In
addition, the project was cost-effective. We use Vizrt for our 24-hour weather
channel and leveraged the existing hardware for the newspaper segment. Vizrt’s
flexible, multi-use architecture was a key reason for selecting Viz|Weather and
Viz|Trio systems when we launched Sky Meteo24 a couple of years ago.”

The
graphics team from Sky, together with system specialists from Vizrt, created an
application based solely on Viz|Artist 3.1. The logic of the application,
including all of the tools such as ‘zoom’, ‘pan’, ‘pen’ and ‘highlighter’, is
programmed with the internal scripting language of Viz|Artist. The only
exception is the ‘Space Manager,’ which automatically optimizes the size and
position of pages in the application’s ‘active’ work area. This complex logic
was written as a plug-in in c++.

McGuinness
said the paper-free newspaper review is just the first application for Sky
Italia’s new ‘touch’ system: “Our next task is to integrate video clips
and then content such as finance, sport, weather and traffic.”