Imagine Communications, supplier of transformative innovation for media and entertainment, and Vizrt, provider of visual storytelling tools for media-content creators, have partnered on a new option for Imagine’s Versio fully integrated broadcast-playout software application: an integrated Viz Engine, which will enable Vizrt’s powerful, live, 3D graphics to be embedded – all powered by Imagine’s integrated Zenium component.

Vizrt’s Viz Engine rendering solution makes use of GPU processing to enable high-quality, real-time rendering of video. The output of Viz Engine when used within the Versio modular playout environment is time synchronized and sent back to the Versio via the Zenium component using shared memory.

“Vizrt’s Viz Engine provides our customers with a powerful real-time graphics engine to suit their content production requirements,” said Mark Senecal, VP, playout and networking, Imagine Communications. “By now offering an integrated solution with Versio and the Viz Engine our customers can simplify their workflows and reduce their total cost of ownership for their whole solution.”

Added Isaac Hersly, director, business development, Vizrt Americas, “The integrated solution of Versio and Virt’s Viz Engine will provide our joint customers with the advantage of leveraging their graphics branding from production through to playout – a complete end-to-end workflow.”

The Vizrt graphics are created using the standard tools such as Viz Artist and stored instantaneously in the Vizrt Graphics Hub, controlled by Viz Multichannel and played out by Viz Engine — offering users a complete workflow.

Versio is a powerful integrated playout solution used worldwide by media companies from small, single-channel to very large, multichannel environments and master-control operations. It combines the best of the world’s automation, branding, graphics, file server, storage and master-control capabilities in an entirely software-based environment.