Artear was born in 1990, when Canal Trece de Buenos Aires, one of the five air stations in the city and La Plata that had begun broadcasting exactly 30 years earlier, joined the giant multimedia Grupo Clarín.
The company has three clearly identified areas: Production (where the programs and their notes are generated, and the films are combined with their cuts); Communication and Image (which in turn has two areas, CAE --Electronic Art Center--, where the image and aesthetics of the channel are defined; and Promotions, to edit the internal promotional pieces, such as the notices of the next day's programs); and News.
"The promotions area has a dizzying dynamic, because many of the daily strips of prime time arrive at short notice, so the creation of the pieces to disseminate them has to be done with very little time," says Hernán Donnari, senior analyst of the technical management of Artear.
Until a few years ago, the channel was managed strictly with linear editing islands. That led to an overcharge of tapes, a continuous degradation of the material as it passed from one tape to another and a lot of waste of time. "If you had to change something minimal in the middle of a piece, you had to redo it all," recalls Donnari, who sums up the situation like this: "Our processes were slow, complicated and expensive."
Only in the mid-1990s the company began to incorporate non-linear islands, although these are PC-based equipment, with its own storage, without the ability to share the material. In 2002 he decided to take the technological leap. "Despite the fact that the country was in crisis and investment in technology was very limited as a result of the exit from convertibility, we decided to bet on reducing the cost and transit of tapes and increasing efficiency, the ability to share material and the speed of work," lists Donnari.
Domingo Simonetta, president of SVC, the company providing the solution, explains that "the advantages of some technologies are so obvious that sometimes there is no doubt that it is convenient to invest in them, regardless of the context. Sometimes an organization finds itself in a position to decide whether to bet on the future or insist on what is going away."
The First Symphony
After an in-depth cost-performance analysis, the choice fell on the proposal of SVC, an Argentine company that represents and supports Avid Technology on a local scale: four Avid Symphony broadcast editing systems for the production sector, to which an Avid Xpress Pro workstation for offline editing was added. . A Deko II FX character generator (with Clip Deko) from Pinnacle Systems was also incorporated into the CAE.
For HD editing and composition, an Avid|DS Nitris system was acquired, which made the channel the first in the country with high definition composition capability. Already with that format were made the miniseries 'Sin código' (pioneer in Argentina in that format) and the graphics and animations in standard definition for 'A very special family', a story currently on screen that includes extraterrestrials in its plot.
The Promotions sector also experienced the process of change: the existing linear and non-linear editors were replaced by four Media Composer Adrenaline workstations, from Avid's DNA family.
The architecture was crowned with an Avid Unity centralized storage system. "When we analyzed the project, we saw that this structure would allow us to ingest the material once into the system and, from there, work it from any of the editing islands," explains Donnari. This possibility made it possible that "the material did not have to be passed so many times from one tape to another and that the processes were much more efficient", according to the same manager.
Simonetta explains the advantages of Unity over other alternatives on the market: "Generic SAN (Storage Area Networks) can be seen as a valid alternative. However, these are networks that are not dedicated to the subject of publishing and whose manufacturers have not specialized in this area."
Through the right channels
Starting with Unity, publishing islands do not have their own storage but are interconnected through high-speed channels (Fibre Channel) against that server. In addition, the unit has Media Manager Select, a workflow administrator that starts from the moment the editor has to generate a promotional piece. "If at night everything that was generated in the studio is ingested, the Promotions editor can see the content and start generating the promotional piece immediately from an ordinary PC, viewing through a special switch the material, in the same quality with which it was generated", says Donnari. Port Server Pro is an application that facilitates the access of common graphics stations to Unity, even without a Fibre Channel connection, such as, for example, a Gigabit Ethernet.
"From a management standpoint, Unity is very flexible. It offers us the possibility of generating different permits for each operator depending on the specific needs of each island," explains Eduardo Bayo, technical manager of Artear. The availability of operators was another key in the decision. "As these are market standards, there are always trained people. A person sits on an island and works, without major complications. He can also manage projects shared with other specialists or participate in parallel work with his colleagues, "says the same executive. Simonetta reinforces this idea: "We already train more than 600 editors at Avid. At some point, I remember someone telling me that if you don't know how to use Avid, you don't have work in this segment."
Donnari highlights the high availability of centralized storage. "We requested it with all possible levels of redundancy: file server, dual switch, dual array, each with its own redundancy," he says.
Our next program
What are the next steps for artear's technological renewal? Everything seems to point to the news. "At present, basically most of the infrastructure is linear. That's why we have a significant need to update it and bring it to a non-linear scheme with centralized storage."
They also analyze alternatives to generate a tapeless scheme, in which not a single tape participates for the entire process, including the broadcast. And soon there will be an update of the Symphony systems. "We understand that it won't take long for them to become obsolete," Bayo says.
Anyway, they can't rush. Bayo says that "changes have to be made step by step, because it's not just about replacing one team with another. It is necessary to modify the mental processes, the way of working, the philosophy, the workflow. We can't make technological change negatively impact day-to-day activity."
"The necessary change of mentality is profound," says Simonetta--. Fortunately, we met young and dynamic people, who welcomed the solutions." The training, carried out by the SVC itself, was implemented at four different levels, as a copywriter, an editor, an operator or the technical maintenance and resource management staff need different training. It covers, basically, non-linear editors and the new modalities involved in working with a central unit, while to learn more complex and specific aspects of the operation of Unity, those responsible for that level of operation will travel to Avid's offices in the United States.
For a long time the slogan of Canal Trece was "Being close is very good". It seems that now they decided to apply it with their different areas of editing.
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