VEDA™ Automation is SGT’s new flagship complementing its flexible and powerful platform to manage your workflows.

The new VEDA™ Automation client is a revolutionary concept, allowing you to decide what you wish to monitor and how you want to display it.

Moreover, VEDA™ Automation does not only offer a new look-and-feel, the technology behind it is the result of SGT’s long-term expertise in this field. SGT’s rock-solid automation server is now able to play out a virtually unlimited number of channels and is more open than ever through its comprehensive set of Web Services.

Control playout

Rock-solid server

• VEDA™ Automation server represents 15 years of experience in playout automation unlocked by the power of today’s computers. You can now manage a virtually unlimited amount of channels with just as many secondary events using only one server, or two for complete redundancy.
• If you add to this SGT’s native API device drivers, your facility will seem almost cable free.

Customizable client

• With the revolutionary VEDA™ Automation client, you can create as many workspace layouts to match your needs and purposes. You can also share and recall them as you wish. VEDA™ Automation client comes along with a complete set of modular features to control, manage and monitor your play out. Every feature is multi-user so you can deploy as many clients as your facility needs to let multiple users work on the same playlist at the same time.

  

Versatile playlist editing

• Edit and view your playlist as never before with the playlist editor aside. Edit any parameter of a primary or secondary event directly, avoiding all sorts of windows popping up, hiding crucial information.

  

• The hierarchical playlist structure helps you focus on key information by regrouping information by:

Two levels of editorial grouping:

• By time slots: just display one line for the entire prime time event. Sponsoring, advertising and the program itself will show as a single line.

• By event types, where a single line represents a group of similar events, for example a block of commercial spots coming from a playlist built by the ad-sales department.

Three levels of technical grouping:

• Primary events: group up all your secondary events to only show the primary event with a summarised status of your branding.

• Secondary events: group all sub-events related to secondary events such as video played during a DVE.

• Triple Play: when broadcasting in several resolutions simultaneously – e.g. SD, HD, DVB-H… – video servers, branding and other secondary events are different per delivery channel while the main information remains the same (name, duration…). Triple play grouping just shows one line for all generic events with a status icon for each delivery channel.

Multichannel playlist viewer

• The compact timeline viewer will save additional display hardware. You monitor your complete facility through a comprehensive set of graphical highlights, such as bright colors when materials are missing or when equipment fails. Tooltips explain crucial playlist information and failures.

  

Secondary events under control

• A comprehensive view on your branding activity. The timeline visualises any discontinuity in a sequence of secondary events. The timeline interacts directly with the playlist editor for fast and responsive last minute adjustments.

User-friendly Jukebox

• VEDA™ Automation is a classic automation and newsroom automation in a single box. The Jukebox feature makes live events easy. All kinds of events can be triggered in any order and whenever you need. You can edit the playlist manually or combine the Jukebox with any MOS-enabled Newsroom.

  

Manage clips and playlists

Powerful content management

• VEDA™ Automation is an integrated part of the entire VEDA™ software suite, meaning that you have access to low-res and high-res material, wherever it resides in your facility. You can transfer bookmarked media using either the intuitive search engine or through shared bookmarks.

• Just select a broadcast version and import the associated branding and censorship automatically (into secondary events).

Drag & drop playlist management

• The playlist library is automatically updated with all available playlists and rundowns. Simply drag & drop a playlist where you want to insert it in the on-air playlist, or open it if you just need to work on it.

Actionable Playlist Preview

• The Playlist Preview gives you a fast and efficient way to check your playlist accuracy:

  • Load and cue your video on transitions or secondary event changes with just one click.

  • Run the playlist around transitions without playing all the media.

  • Run the on-air playlist ahead of its actual on-air time throughout your facility to fully validate your transmission.

    

Frame-accurate Browsing

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  Just drag & drop any media from the playlist or from the entire media library into VEDA™’s Media Player to preview it in frame-accurate low-resolution.

• Moreover, you can drag & drop any media from the Media Player into the playlist, to directly air the high-res version.

Monitor transmission

On-Air & Next event

• Displays crucial information for all your channels. Just click on a channel logo to edit the corresponding playlist in the playlist editor.

  

Equipment status

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  Monitor the available broadcast equipment, and their status. The detailed view displays critical information on video servers, VTRs, and whether or how the equipment is used in the pool.

• Pool management does not only spare on broadcast equipment by optimizing their capacity utilization, it also helps you manage broadcast priorities.

VEDA™ Services

• Make sure that your media is progressing seamlessly through your workflow. Every VEDA™ Service reports its status and its load so you can anticipate bottlenecks and take action immediately.

Customise and integrate

The comprehensive VEDA™ Web Services are designed to adapt the VEDA™ suite to your specific needs and environment in a transparent, reliable and scalable manner. Web Services apply to any step in your workflow:

Playlist Web Services

• Find, create, modify and delete playlists in VEDA™, with a broad set of playlist-related Web Services.

• In particular, you may edit playlists in any way, for instance:

  • Hand out the list of primary events you wish to transmit

  • Have your Scheduling System provide the branding and subtitling.

On-Air Web Services

• An equally comprehensive set of Web Services is available for transmission monitoring and to enhance VEDA™ Automation with complementary features, such as:

  • Deliver content using alternate technologies, e.g. Internet, mobile, …

  • Send reports, alarms or statistics throughout your information system

  • Control third-party graphics automation.

Logging Web Services

• As-run logs can be retrieved through Web Services, containing precise information related to your actual transmission.

• In addition, as-run logs trace every single action that operators might have carried out on the playlist.

The VEDA™ software suite integrates SGT’s unique know-how in video content management for traditional broadcasters with the need for multi-delivery models.

VEDA™ reduces the Total Cost of Ownership of video content management solutions for broadcasters, new media companies, system integrators and service providers.

VEDA™ is customizable and upgradable. Customers used to pick and place VEDA™ components, to fit their own workflow. You can now connect to VEDA™ using SGT’s catalogue of Web Services. Web Services allow you to add any feature or interface you need.

System integrators and service providers can now capture substantial value around SGT’s VEDA™ suite, in terms of installation, customization, operation and maintenance services.

The new VEDA™ Services automate any kind of workflow, either those of traditional broadcasters or the new processes involved in multi-delivery content distribution.

SGT is a pioneer and a key player in the broadcast world. Naturally, the VEDA™ suite manages traditional broadcast workflows:

Today, SGT stays alongside broadcasters to help them evolve as new demands emerge around video content. VEDA™ Services can easily manage any kind of workflow involving video media, from linear video to any other way of delivering content.

VEDA™ meets the needs of any broadcaster or multi-delivery video content provider, at every single step of its workflow, from Program Management to Publishing.

VEDA™ features a comprehensive set of software components that handle every step of any video content related workflow. Remember that you can pick and place any of these components to fit your own workflow!

Program management

Broadcasters need to make sure that they use up all the rights they have acquired, while ensuring that their advertising revenues match their costs.

This seems straightforward but it can quickly become a nightmare when you manage complex editorial grids forcing you to follow thematic schemes, for one or more weeks.

It would be much easier if a system not only informs you about how you are supposed to fill in your multichannel grids, but also suggest the most appropriate program for a given date and time.

The VEDA™ Program Management components take care of the complete life cycle of your media from the moment you get the contract until your rights are used. Keep track of your providers with VEDA™ Contract Management, keep an eye on your media with VEDA™ Program Management, and be sure that you comply with your editorial strategy using VEDA™ Pre-grid and VEDA™ Repeat Broadcast Rules. Once you start programming, using up the proper rights is guaranteed, thanks to embedded Rights Management in the search feature, accessible all through the VEDA™ Program Management components. The As-Run Log returned by VEDA™ automation will confirm that you have spent your money as planned and do not owe money due to an unpredicted transmission.

Ingest management

Imagine that you operate in a fully tapeless environment, whether you run a continuity channel, prepare a news program, manage a (post) production facility, or deliver content over the Internet.

You want to make sure that all the files you receive are stored quickly at the right place in the system, that their quality meets your customer’s expectations, and that you minimise retyping metadata. At the end of the day, it is all about streamlining the overall cost of your ingest operation, while ensuring smooth and effective further media processing subsequently.

VEDA™’s file based ingest relies on VEDA™ Media Collector to detect and import any sort of clip, automatically. Through the VEDA™ MXF Interface, these clips are stored with their metadata attached, regardless of the format. Therefore you will not depend on a single technology, vendor or content provider. The clips can then be validated with VEDA™’s editorial and technical Content Checking Components to make sure that you have received the right file with the appropriate level of quality.

If you manage live ingests, like satellite feeds or sports, you want to rely on a simple but powerful tool to schedule the events and collect the related metadata. As markets evolve and new technologies emerge, your system must integrate them seamlessly.

As for tape ingest, why invest in extra hardware when tapes can be ingested while no live events are scheduled? Wouldn’t it be much easier if tape video ingest could be conducted around live events, with time-coded quality reports presented to the user for fast and effective validation?

This is all brought to you by VEDA™’s Ingest Management components that rely on the efficient VEDA™ Record Automation engine. This engine not only assures that your clips are ingested frame accurately but also manages your video equipment so that it is used efficiently.

When you combine VEDA™’s ability to adapt to any metadata structure with its comprehensive set of Web Services to access and modify this metadata, you will understand that VEDA™ meets your needs.

VEDA™ Device Manager draw on a library of nearly 300 wide-spread industry protocols, allowing you to use a large variety of ingest servers and devices.

VEDA™ provides you with a cost effective, flexible and interoperable ingest solution, whatever your workflow, environment and formats.

Search & cataloguing

When running a media company, you need to create new content. Every day your team has to tell compelling stories, one way or another.

This is where VEDA™’s Search & Retrieve comes in with unmatched benefits: you will inspire your team by revealing your assets in the most transparent way you have ever imagined. You will help them find and reuse content that you already own! And, there is one more special thing about it: you don’t even need to know the literal keywords to find something.

Your assets represent a colossal value. What could be better than using them as a source of inspiration for your program makers? They will retrieve media to illustrate their stories by using their own words and expressions. Rather than spelling keywords, they will type ideas or concepts: the VEDA™ Search & Retrieve component will look at the meaning behind the words and return any relevant media: it ignores spelling errors in either the metadata or the search query. It will also find words that match phonetically. And, while looking for the meaning, VEDA™ Search & Retrieve is entirely cross-language, regardless of character sets such as Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic.

Think about how difficult it is to find comparisons or metaphors on the Internet: you do not know yet what you are looking for, so how would you expect formulating it using an exact spelling? VEDA™’s Search & Retrieve bypasses all of this. VEDA™’s Search & Retrieve understands what you mean and automatically proposes related subjects or terms to help you narrow down your search and bring you the content you need instantly. And results are not only based on a general media description, but they are also timecode based, within the media.

VEDA™’s Search & Retrieve improves your performance as it is brought to you by people who understand your business. People who know how to move around and store high quality video since the early days and now offer you to leverage what you have been archiving all along these years.

VEDA™’s Bookmark Management offers you the best way to get your teams to work together and share content at any step of your workflow. And to make sure that you can share it anywhere, VEDA™’s Search & Retrieve and Browsing components are compatible with Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer.

Editing

When preparing a production using the assets in your system, you will save time and money by selecting your material and trimming it on standard low-cost workstations anywhere in your facilities, before going into the actual post-production.

VEDA™’s Editing components allow viewing and pre-editing selected material. At their own desks your program makers work on high-quality but low-bandwidth WM9 files, reducing the costs relative to storage and network infrastructures. VEDA™’s unique WM9 control is frame accurate in control and in timecode. You can advance and reverse frame by frame without any jump or glitch while the low-res and the high-res version show you exactly the same frame at any given timecode.

So, you start editing on WM9 low-resolution files with VEDA™’s Offline Editing tool and then, you push the resulting EDL to a craft edit station, such as Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer. VEDA™’s service components assure that the EDL is followed by a “partial restore” of the high-res versions of the used material.

Another aspect of editing is preparing your finished media for different deliveries with different regulations. With VEDA™’s Marking and Validation component, you can create an unlimited amount of “marked versions”. In a way, marking is creating an EDL that is conformed in real-time during transmission. You can add markers to delineate advertising breaks and all the graphics you want to insert. You can skip segments for a daytime version, while leaving them in for the late evening version. This will not use any extra disk space, as markers are the only thing that is saved until the final delivery. The selected segments will be loaded in the playlist, with any projected commercial breaks between them.

VEDA™’s Editing components offer you an effective way to make the most of your existing infrastructure.

Publishing

Today, media delivery is a real challenge. Broadcasters are striving to make their channels more attractive with compelling graphics or HD. The Internet has opened up new ways of delivering media to the audience in combination with innovative business models.

VEDA™ Publishing offers tools to manage both linear broadcasting and web or file-based delivery. For linear TV channels, you have to tease viewers relentlessly to increase and maintain their loyalty to your channel, more and more cost effectively.

For linear broadcasting, the new VEDA™ Automation server, based on SGT’s rock-solid automation, will now manage a virtually unlimited number of channels.

The associated new and revolutionary VEDA™ Automation client, allows you to design the look-and-feel of your automation for the most convenient and productive control of your play-out. Each operator can even save his or her own workspace and open it on different clients.

The new VEDA™ Automation Client excels in helping you master your secondary events. The secondary events timeline shows how your graphics evolve, i.e. how and when graphics will be transmitted. When you want to modify a graphic event, the VEDA™ Automation Client will either display the parameters or launch any state-of-the-art graphics automation plug-in to modify and preview the rendered graphics.

Two VEDA™ Services: VEDA™ Device Manager and VEDA™ Loader, ensure that the right clip plays on-air at the right time.

If you are delivering over the web, you want to make sure that viewers retrieve the content they desire and that they are entitled to access, and also ensure you get your revenues from advertising, either by inserting adverts in the web pages or directly in the video for instance. The same VEDA™ Services, VEDA™ Device Manager and VEDA™ Loader, deliver the appropriate clip in the right format to the right person, according to the requests received from your web portal, whatever its technology thanks to VEDA™ Web Services.

In addition to the dependability of SGT software, the new VEDA™ Wizard makes it quick and easy to install and update by SGT or our partners

The new VEDA™ Wizard is an all-in-one tool ensuring that all your VEDA™ components get installed, configured and tuned in no time. It guarantees that the VEDA™ suite is more reliable than ever, as installation errors are avoided.

And VEDA™ Wizard is not only created for SGT project teams. We designed it with such an intuitive user interface, that we can now hand over VEDA™ installation to SGT’s seasoned partners, such as systems integrators or service providers.

VEDA™’s comprehensive Web Services bring a SMART approach to SGT’s unique ability to tailor its solutions. SGT’s partners CAN now ADD their own value to VEDA™

The new Web Service-based API offers a complete set of commands giving you the opportunity to adapt VEDA™ to any kind of needs. Whether you need to match specific requests in your workflow or if you want third-party software to work directly on the content, you will find the command that you need amongst our catalogue.

Prior to our Web services API, integration and sharing of data was limited. Web Services is a technology allowing data to be transmitted across any IP network, using a familiar XML programming methodology and an https client-server connection. Only data is transmitted using Web services technology, developers are free to use or to design their own interfaces.

VEDA™ Web Services benefit to all departments of your business. Executives are going to appreciate the resulting return on investment, while developers and architects already know that Web Services shorten development time and facilitate connectivity.

Web Services also simplify the way your entire system is managed. As every add-on to the VEDA™ suite has to go through the Web Service “gateway”, the core VEDA™ suite remains untouched. Therefore, the whole system becomes more robust and easier to maintain or to upgrade.

Note: some features will be available in a futere update of VEDA version 10.