RTL counts on Miranda for control, branding

Miranda Technologies today announced that RTL Television GmbH,
Germany’s largest cable and satellite commercial television station,
has installed Miranda’s Imagestore 300+ master control switchers and
Intuition+ channel branding co-processors to handle special
requirements on its main revenue channel for its playout clients.

“In
the past, our playout system could only manage channel branding and
promotional graphics that were fully prepared in advance”, said Gertrud
Groterhorst, Engineer for Broadcast Projects at RTL Television.

“In
order to satisfy our commercial clients’ playout requirements, we
needed a graphics set-up that would allow us to make last minute
adjustments, with all the special effects of a traditionally
pre-prepared item. With Miranda’s field accurate graphics solution, we
can now perform DVE effects for commercial spots, and split-screens for
sports programme insertions just before going to air, whilst saving a
lot of time and resources”.

Three Imagestore master control
switchers are controlled under Abit’s Present_it automation system at
RTL’s playout centre in Cologne, with one for preparation and preview,
and the other two running in parallel for playout and back up. Each
unit provides video and audio mixing, animation insertion, and
character generation capabilities. RTL will use Miranda’s Intuition
advanced graphics co-processor for multi-level graphics and clip
playout for junction graphics, interstitials and commercials.

All
the graphics for the Imagestore processors are created by RTL Creation,
RTL Televisions’ daughter company. The Intuition’s advanced template
software with embedded control allows the graphics team to maintain
full control over the look of a channel, without having to worry about
the limits of the automation system.

The Miranda processors
provide all ‘secondary events’ for the RTL channel, which involve a
range of promotional graphics, from a simple text insertion to
eye-catching DVE effects. RTL’s automation system is able to handle all
16 keying layers of the Imagestore Intuition, and can assign up to 16
secondary events per main event, whilst also being able to adjust the
duration of each secondary event.

What’s more, RTL operators
need only to confirm each secondary event just before going to air.
This is performed using a web interface which automatically collects
all the information from Miranda’s Intuition software. RTL use
Miranda’s Intuition ‘Builder’ for graphics template creation, as well
as Clock Builder, Audio Builder and Animation Builder to create
corresponding files on the file server. During new schedule importing,
the Abit automation system checks the planned secondary events against
information in the database, and distributes copies of all files to the
Imagestores and Intuition, which can then be dynamically assigned for
on-air, back-up or preview. This ensures failsafe and accurate on-air
processing for RTL s commercial clients.