Challenge: Maintain a high-speed breaking news operation while moving to a cloud-native, digital-first production
Solution: Flexible setup, fast cutting, and growing file capabilities
VRT, the Flemish regional public-service broadcaster in Belgium, has been a technologically forward-leaning broadcaster for decades whose constant work to push the limits of innovation has seen many manifestations. This stretches from state-of-the-art work in virtual reality production technology and LED-based studios, through deep involvement in many EU projects, including several to fight disinformation using technology, to the VRT Sandbox initiative where they screen, coach, test and fund startups in media tech and media content.
The Challenge
As platform numbers and content needs increase and staff resources are stretched, the need to work fast, work accurately, and work from anywhere has never been more keenly felt by broadcast organizations everywhere - and VRT is no exception. Their legacy PAM system was becoming outdated and did not provide the right combination of nimbleness and search power - and it was necessary to move from a television-only world, where all material was HD AVCi100 house format, to a new online-first approach, where video can be HD, 4K, vertical, from a security camera, from an iPhone or any other combination. VRT needs a system that provides speed when working with proxies and hi-res files, allows simple, breaking news cutting of sequences, and scales to remote use when needed. Maintaining speed in all workflows, especially breaking news scenarios, was a primary priority for VRT when planning and executing this project. 
The Solution
VRT’s deployment of Mimir uses the cloud-native SaaS PAM setup to add scalability, flexibility, and the ability to go location-agnostic to a mostly on-premises workflow. This approach builds business flexibility and future-proof workflows unavailable in a legacy on-premises solution.
VRT handled all infrastructure, hardware, and on-premises IT work in-house. This gave the team excellent knowledge and confidence in the setup and reflected the skills available in the VRT organization and the relative ease with which the systems can be deployed. This is further evidenced by the speed with which the VRT team got hands-on access to the system — a few days after the tender procedure was completed, they had their own workable Mimir tenant to start testing and training.
Four elements mainly contribute to meeting VRT’s goal of maintaining speed for breaking news while also increasing collaboration and flexibility:
- The option of an in-house hi-res workflow
- Using the Mimir Cutter for fast sequence cutting
- Fast proxy workflow for breaking news
- The ability to move news gathering and asset operations anywhere, anytime
Says Tom De Wispelaere, Manager Technology Teams at VRT:
"As a leading broadcaster and news organization in the heart of Europe, VRT is driven by innovation and a deep commitment to using the latest technologies to better engage, inform, and connect with our diverse audience. Mimir has rapidly transformed our workflows, empowering us to deliver news faster and with unprecedented flexibility. Our partnership with Mimir ensures that we can deliver high-quality content in real-time, from anywhere, while staying ahead of the ever-evolving demands of modern media."
Local Hi-res
It was important for the VRT team to work entirely in-house with their hi-res files to push quality and speed to the limit of current technological capabilities. Because Mimir offers the option of moving only proxies to the cloud for transcription and analysis while hi-res assets remain on-premises, VRT can both work immediately on local hi-res files as they are added to the system and use return transcripts of the proxies for editing assistance very quickly. This also means a high-speed and seamless integration with the on-premises studio playout infrastructure.
Fast Cutting and Editing
To further speed up breaking news cutting, VRT have embraced the Mimir Cutter, an in-app component of Mimir that allows effortless cutting of sequences onto a timeline for rendering or export to Adobe Premiere Pro. Inside the Mimir Cutter, editors have found even more speed by leveraging transcript-based editing capabilities, setting in and out points in assets by selecting sections of the text transcript. Because Mimir uses a rewrapping method to provide ultra-high-speed, lossless rendering for MXF, AVC-Intra, and XAVC-Intra codecs, creating and rendering a new sequence is almost instantaneous.
Fast proxy and live material workflows
In Mimir, there is no need for files to be completed before proxies are generated, nor is it necessary to wait for the whole proxy to be available before using it. In a breaking news scenario, valuable time can be saved working with new assets because of the ability to edit-while-ingest in both hires and proxy. The same applies to handling material from live broadcasts: VRT employees ingest directly to Mimir and work on the growing MXF files as they become available in the system. They also take advantage of cutting on-premises growing proxies in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Deploying resources where they are needed
By taking their asset workflow cloud-native, VRT gained the ability to quickly and efficiently prioritize the deployment of resources to where they will benefit viewers most. Collaborative asset workflows with contributions from the entire team, including the occasional citizen contributors through dynamic upload portals, and the possibility to quickly add or access resources from wherever stories are taking place using very efficient cloud-only workflows are critical to a modern news-gathering operation.
Future-proof setup
The VRT team has been eager to experiment with and add cloud-native asset workflows to add flexibility and location independence to production. Doing so has also given them access to cloud services like transcription, analysis, and more while still working hi-res on-premises. Enabling a robust proxy workflow puts in place a solid future-proof setup, giving remote, on-location, and home users the same access to the assets as someone working in the broadcast center — meaning that the right people can work on the right stories — all the time.
