The company is demonstrating a new Adobe After Effects integration, incorporating a plug-in and pre-render workflow designed to simplify graphics and promo production.

Working in conjunction with Pebble Beach Systems’ Dolphin integrated channel device under Marina automation control, this new integration manages the process of automatically rendering After Effects templates and delivers them straight to playout.

The playout engine load is reduced without compromising quality, says Stuart Wood of Pebble Beach

The playout engine load is reduced without compromising quality, says Stuart Wood of Pebble Beach

By removing the need to convert Adobe graphics into vendor-specific formats, the plug-in gives graphics designers the creative freedom to use any feature supported in After Effects for on-air graphics, and eliminates the sometimes laborious task of individually rendering many different versions of a promo or graphic, said Pebble.

The company added that while many broadcasters deploy discrete graphics platforms for playout of their high value channels, some thematic channels are a lot less dynamic and the cost of incorporating a full graphics engine in the playout chain cannot be justified. This new Adobe integration renders out a complex graphic template to a single media asset ahead of time, so that the playout engine load is reduced without compromising the quality of graphics and branding for the channel.

Any After Effects project can be converted into a pre-render template via the new plug-in. The designer simply selects which part(s) of their project will be ‘dynamic’. These dynamic elements will subsequently be populated by content from the Marina playlist at render time, allowing the relevant text, video, images, and/or audio to be inserted, said Pebble.

Pebble Beach is exhibiting at IBC2019 on Stand 8.B68.