ITN Selects All-Digital Avid Workflow For ITV and Channel 4 News Service

Avid Technology, a provider of tools for film, video, audio, 3D animation, gaming and broadcast professionals, has announced that ITN, a leading independent broadcast news producer, has completed the installation of an end-to-end Avid digital workflow to deliver its national news services for ITV, including News At Ten and Channel 4.
The system is built around the Avid Interplay nonlinear workflow engine, the Avid iNEWS newsroom control system and the Avid Unity ISIS media network, and will enable ITN to effectively create and supply content for a broad range of platforms including television, Web and Mobile phones. ITN will deploy the new digital media solution to streamline the management of its various media assets across a shared network.
Keith Cass, Director of Technology at ITN, said: "The media asset management tools available with Interplay, together with a very high performance and scalable server in AvidUnity ISIS, embodied how we felt a modern news production system should work.
"Avid has a proven track record in nonlinear editing and many years of experience in media asset management and production servers. This experience, together with the proven success of Avid systems in other news organisations such as the ITV News Regions, made Avid an obvious choice."
Cass continues: "This is one of the most collaborative project I have ever worked on and it really shows in the delivery. Both ITV News and Channel 4 News wanted to put more control in the hands of the production journalist, so key newsroom stakeholders were involved right from the beginning of our workflow definition and continued through to its delivery. As a result we have a much better understanding across the technical, production and editorial departments about how the system should be used and what the strengths and limitations are in the system. We are confident, thanks to the collaboration between Avid, our Newsroom teams and our technologists, that Avid's Interplay/ISIS system will take ITN's news production to another dimension, giving us some of the most sophisticated and modern newsrooms in the world."
The new fully digital workflow is powered by: an Avid Interplay solution for integrated asset management and workflow automation; an AVID Unity ISIS media network with approximately 160TB storage capacity; an Avid iNEWS system as the Newsroom Computer System (NCRS); more than 40 Avid AirSpeed systems to handle ingest-to-playout, controlled by Avid iNEWS Command; more than 100 editing stations, including Avid NewsCutter XP systems and Avid Interplay Assist seats which provide editing capabilities with desktop video tools for logging, shot selection and review.
Channel 4 News went live on the new system at the end of January 2008, and the ITV News went on-air in April 2008.
Further information is available at: www.avid.com and www.itn.co.uk.
(KMcA/JM)