Weather Graphics: The Weather Company

In 1998 and with the aim of becoming the first company specialized in meteorological services for the media, The Weather Company was founded in Australia. This company develops its activities concentrated in four main areas:

• Sale and service of systems for live weather presentations.
• Design and production of graphics ready for presentations on television and internet.
• Production of scripts for radio and television presentations.
• Production of information and weather forecasts.

The Weather Company's team of meteorologists receives the data generated by the national climate office in Australia and converts it into digital information ready to be presented by the media, likewise The Weather Company offers support for its clients in the form of interviews or live Live Chroma-key presentations when the station's usual presenters are not available.

The flagship product of this house is the Weather Producer, a software package that offers a complete solution for the integration and presentation of weather information for television. The objectives set by the company for the development of the package were to increase efficiency, simplify production and at the same time present high-quality graphics.

Weather Producer offers complete automation in the production of graphics, an integrated function called autocue that the presenter controls through a GPI or a wireless remote control.

Weather Producer includes a graphics composition package that allows the TV station to use existing default templates or create new ones, incorporating this data into live presentations that is reduced to a click-of-the-mouse action. . This model editing package is easy to learn for any competent graphic designer requiring only basic instruction as it uses procedures similar to those of other commercial applications.

Weather producer is fed with meteorological data through the internet or with a direct line of data, this continuous flow is stored on the computer in the same way as the scripts of the presenter, who can access the information for preview, visualization and editing at any time.

The television station can monitor the flow of data through a network browser that accesses the presenter's computer constantly verifying the timeliness and accuracy of the same, this allows it to always receive the latest information available.

The presenter prepares his weather program through the Sequencer function. That corresponds to the place where programs and scripts are created and edited. You can also select from a variety of transition effects to complement the presentation.

The weather program is broadcast using the Replay function that makes use of the 4 possible video outputs of the Weather Producer to provide line, preview, main channel and autocue videos. Replay allows the presenter to select a sequence previously stored on the computer and present it to the air using the wireless remote control. Alternatively, the GPI control allows you to control the system from the studio control room. A remarkable feature is the integration of autocue scripts with graphics. When the presenter is live, the autocue function keeps the scripts and graphics in sync. This eliminates the need for an operator for this function and puts the presenter in charge of all the information.

The market targets for the Weather Producer are ideally regional markets and small metropolitan markets. It is one hundred percent compatible with sophisticated high-end systems for the generation of graphics and animations in three dimensions and is capable of supporting a wide variety of formats. For example, for images it supports Targa, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PCT and GIF extensions. AVI for animations, WAV for audio, MPEG for movies and for textTrue Type fonts.

Hardware requirements are Pentium PC 500MHz, 256 Mb RAM, 9Gig LVD UW SCSI AV hard drive and Matrox Digisuite LE video card. The package runs under Windows NT.

When the time of the meteorological presentation approaches, the graphics department of the newscast devotes a significant part of time to the production of the graphic material. This can take anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes each day committing expensive equipment and personnel. The good news is that this inefficiency is no longer necessary. The Weather Company can provide daily, and ready to be transmitted, all the necessary graphs for the weather forecast section at a reasonable cost.

The sophisticated database and automated system allows to offer graphics designed especially for each client, from the concept and complete design of the program to the production and sending of graphs for daily presentations. The graphics production service has four main modalities:

• The development of a complete style of graphics that can incorporate 3D and animation.
• The production of backgrounds, titles, icons and animated clips.
• The development of a graphics delivery system (usually online or Internet ISDN)
• The daily production and delivery of weather graphs ready to transmit.

At the most basic level, The Weather Company can use the backgrounds existing in the usual newscast scheme and incorporate synoptic maps, satellite images and forecasting, maintaining the same style.

A few years ago to make a section of meteorology on television it was enough to read some temperatures of the main cities and quote the national climate office. However, today the information age public is demanding an expert interpretation of the weather forecast. This requires more depth and knowledge on the part of the presenter. The Weather Company's script production service can give non-meteorologist presenters the tools and credibility needed in a weather forecast presentation.

The company's media center produces radio and television scripts designed exclusively for each client. The journalistic approach is to offer the interpretive angle that assures the presenter the possibility of communicating a clear message to the viewer. Scripts can be delivered to the client in various ways including: email, FTP or directly in the client's Weather Producer where they are automatically incorporated into the program. In the case of special weather events, the client can request additional scripts with the option of live interviews with meteorologists of the company.

On the other hand, for the radio The Weather Company can produce scripts for the weather forecast every hour offering radio stations the possibility to be up to date with the latest information available.

The Weather Company also offers the service of designing weather content pages for print media and the Internet, these pages include as standard content daily forecast, weather maps, satellite images, forecast for the next four days and a list with rainfall indices. These pages are developed following the specifications required by each client. and in the case of print media The Weather Company may provide pages in black and white or color, or in both versions, the materials are delivered ready for printing in Quark Xpres, EPS or any other format required by the client.

Learn more at www.theweather.com.au