Aveco demos ASTRA Studio 3 news production automation system
Aveco will demonstrate ASTRA Studio 3, the company’s third-generation news production automation system in Stand 3.B67 at IBC in Amsterdam. ASTRA Studio 3 includes many breaking news features that the company says speeds up time to air while also elevating production values to help keep viewers engaged.
Aveco says ASTRA Studio 3 uniquely provides multi-studio production automation, an important advantage for larger facilities over “single-studio” automation solutions. With Aveco, studios can easily be combined for major events. When production runs long in one studio, projects can be reassigned with one keystroke to other studios in a facility, with all production switcher settings, graphics, virtual sets, video roll-ins, on-set monitors, camera robotics, audio settings and lighting settings easily available in the alternate studio.
Astra Studio 3 includes a host of new features, including floating shots that provide unique flexibility in handling a director’s breaking news requests outside a planned rundown, with the flexibility to handle events across multiple stories (on-site video, set backgrounds, branding, graphics etc.). Astra Studio 3 MAM integration allows video search results to get to air instantly outside of a rundown during breaking news, and includes the ability to integrate with multiple third-party MAMs (Avid, EVS, Quantel, InStat, Octopus, Vizrt and others) in a facility.
Key to ASTRA Studio 3’s flexibility is a new Template Editor used to develop and modify story templates that specify how a story is presented. Other features include one-button release of CG control during times of breaking news, an advanced mode for news magazine and episodic studio recording, improved video search and additional local/remote preview capabilities.
“ASTRA Studio 3 incorporates feedback from existing ASTRA Studio 2 customers to make this new system even more capable and powerful,” said Pavel Potuzak, Aveco’s founder and CEO. “ASTRA Studio 3 enables our customers to produce newscasts, magazine shows, and other studio productions easier, with more impressive graphics and effects and with lower operating costs. The ability for ASTRA Studio 3 to control a wide range of broadcast equipment as well as our Redwood Studio-in-a-Box — with the same operator interface — makes this an attractive system for both big and small studios, as well as hub-and-spoke networks where regional studios are seamlessly integrated with a central control point.”
ASTRA Studio 3 supports all types of playout configurations, including from the cloud, from an integrated device where everything needed is in one box (Aveco’s Redwood Family), from a rack of dedicated devices, or any combination desired. ASTRA Studio 3 is included in Aveco’s ASTRA Suite of Tools, which includes media asset management, workflow automation, master control automation, news/live assist, ingest, hierarchical storage management, and interfaces to NRCS, traffic system, streaming devices, transcoders, and other applications.
Aveco will be exhibiting at IBC 2015 in Amsterdam in Stand 3.B67.