The overarching trend fully on display at 2016 NAB Show when it comes to broadcast graphics will be a significant change in the way graphics are produced for television news.

At the heart of this change is a workflow transition that puts TV reporters and other content producers in the graphics driver’s seat.

The idea is to enable reporters and others in the newsroom to populate pre-defined templates with elements such as text, images, weather graphics and other material, and free up trained graphic artists for higher level creative tasks.

Graphics Workflow
“We strongly believe the industry is in the middle of a technology transition, and on the other side it is going to be content driving the production,” says Jesper Gawell, chief marketing officer, at ChyronHego.

To that end, the company will introduce CAMIO Universe, a software-based newsroom production system. Not only does the new offering make it simple for journalists to insert lower-thirds, but with the help of templates it makes it possible to insert interactive graphics, virtual and augmented graphics and even weather graphics into their stories.

“One day, there won’t be separate systems for all of these [graphics functions],” he says. “They need to come together into a unified workflow.”

Ofir Benovici, senior director, broadcast products at Avid, concurs. “The real value [of this approach] is you are empowering the journalist to choose and decide which graphics to use, how to use them and when to use them.”

Over the past year since Avid announced its acquisition of Orad, much of the R&D work on broadcast graphics systems has been devoted to further integrating Orad graphics into the Avid portfolio, streamlining workflow “and making everything better, tighter and smoother,” Benovici says.

For instance, at the NAB Show, Avid will demonstrate how a journalist can access a graphic element database from the user interface of its MediaCentral platform, find a template, insert graphics and preview it in a MediaCentral window.

“When you are happy with the graphics, you can publish them, and they will become part of your story and rundown,” Benovici says.

This streamlined workflow offers TV stations, groups and networks two benefits. It gives reporters greater control over their stories, and it integrates graphics more deeply into the overall news production workflow rather than treating graphics production as “a standalone, isolated environment,” he says.

Vizrt is also planning to demonstrate a major change in broadcast graphics workflow at the NAB Show, says David Jorba, president of Vizrt Americas.

“Our aim is to be able to work anywhere in the production from a browser, from any of the different production points and have all of our tools available at any time, whether you are inside the newsroom system, standalone or inside a nonlinear editor,” Jorba says.

This browser-based interface underlying the Vizrt rethink of broadcast graphics workflow also supports an ongoing shift from the control room to the studio for control over graphics presentation, he says.

“Traditionally the function of the control room has been playing out full-screen graphics to accompany the news and the data that needs to be shown during the show,” he says. “But now the trend is more towards inside the studio and having the anchor and presenters do more there.”

At the NAB Show, Vizrt will show Viz Multiplay with a browser-based interface to make that a reality. The product, which can be used from a control room or in the studio by a presenter, provides interactive control over placement of graphics, images and video onto videowalls, which increasingly are becoming a fixture on many news sets, Jorba says.

“You can just push it with your finger,” he adds. “This graphic goes to the videowall on the left, this graphic goes to the videowall on the right. It is really that dynamic.”

For Pixel Power, the change in broadcast graphics workflow centers on virtualizing its Clarity graphics engine in an on-premise or public cloud, says company EVP Mike O’Connell.

While the company continues to sell Clarity as a standalone, virtualizing it as a software service running in the cloud allows Pixel Power to offer a “pay-as-you-go model with Pixel on Demand,” he says. “With Pixel on Demand, you just pay for render time for graphics and the file-based output of those graphics.”

Likening the payment model to a mobile phone plan, O’Connell says the approach gives broadcasters the dual benefits of avoiding CAPEX outlays and a means to bill specific departments within their operation that actually use the graphics, such as a promotion department.

“And, if they don’t want to promote anything [for a period of time] and they use the virtual environment, they can stand down their instance until they actually want to market something else in the future,” he says.

Sports Graphics
While the overall trend in broadcast graphics at this year’s NAB Show will be changes to workflow, several other themes will also be important, including election graphics, augmented and virtual reality, social media and sports.