Vizrt's Viz|Artist 3.1 graphics software is supporting a paperless newspaper review segment during Sky Italia's 24-hour news channel, Sky TG24. The anchor of “I Giornale di Oggi” browses the morning’s press articles with a touchscreen application, which viewers have grown to like.
The Special Projects team at TG24 came up with the idea of having the anchor select thumbnails of newspaper pages and drag them to an active work area on an HD touchscreen. Headlines, photographs and finely printed words and phrases are then centered, scaled and highlighted. Several external cameras capture the screen’s HD quality, while the content of the active area is fed concurrently in SD directly to the switcher.
The news channel also uses Vizrt software for its 24-hour weather channel and leveraged the existing hardware for the newspaper segment. The flexibility of Vizrt’s graphics architecture was a key reason for selecting Viz|Weather and Viz|Trio systems when Sky Meteo24 was launched three years ago.
The graphics team from Sky, together with system specialists from Vizrt, created an application based solely on Viz|Artist 3.1. The logic of the application, including all of the tools such as zoom, pan, pen and highlighter, is programmed with the internal scripting language of Viz|Artist. The only exception is the “Space Manager,” which automatically optimizes the size and position of pages in the
application’s active work area.
The paper-free newspaper review is one of many applications for Sky Italia’s new touch system. The next step is to integrate video clips and then content such as finance, sport, weather and traffic.
For more information, visit www.vizrt.com.
