Argentina. Artear is using Telestream's Vantage Transcode Pro to automate the transcoding and processing of media entering and leaving its Avid asset management, storage and editing systems.
Owned by Argentine media conglomerate Grupo Clarín, Artear produces and distributes Spanish-language content such as telenovelas, game shows, news and dance competitions. To compete effectively in the digital age, Artear manages and distributes nearly a dozen channels in a multiplatform universe spanning free-to-air television, cable and digital sites.
To better manage its multifaceted operations, Artear recently opened a new 2600 square meter Content Production Center, the largest in Latin America, with four studios boasting an Avid MediaCentral post-production workflow. A key component of mediaCentral's workflow is a Telestream Vantage Transcode Pro system that automates the transcoding and processing of media entering and leaving Avid asset management, storage, and editing systems.
Artear's Vantage Transcode Pro workflow is accelerated using four Lightspeed K80 Telestream servers, plus 10 Dell CPU nodes running Vantage. "As our operations continue to grow, I can't imagine how we would handle our current media processing workload without Vantage," said Jose Gabriel Ciccarelli, Avid ACSR, for Artear. "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."
To meet all of its distribution requirements, including viewing on a variety of home and mobile devices, Artear needs to reuse every instance of video it produces in a variety of adaptive bitrate (ABR) formats and variants.
Artear has also configured its Vantage system with Vantage Transcode Multiscreen, a GPU-accelerated solution for creating high-quality ABR packages. That process optimizes video content for proper viewing on all the different connected devices that today's viewers want to use.
Some of Artear's most challenging workflows relate to the voluminous content that airs on the TN cable news network and its transcoding into formats suitable for use on the TN.com.ar website and international distribution channels. "By automating these tasks, we have eliminated human error, which is common in repetitive tasks. And with accelerated processing, we can ensure that media files are ready in time for post-production. With Vantage, we've gained valuable time, that's very true," Ciccarelli added.
Today, Vantage automates a wide range of media processes for Artear, including:
• Media ingestion from a watch folder directly in Interplay and/or ISIS
• Conversion between formats, codecs and frame rates
• Creation of adaptive bitrate packages for cross-platform distribution
• Handling of 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
• Mixing audio channels and normalization tasks, such as loudness correction
• Allows media expansion and add in/out fades and movie and image overlays
• Generation of proxies for archiving
"Before Vantage, we only needed to ingest around 150 Sony camera files per day in 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, wherever and whenever they want," Ciccarelli concluded.
