Distribution
Automating complex post-production audio workflows
Astro
Satellite Television & Radio Operator
All-Asian Satellite Television and Radio Operator, doing business as Astro, is a Malaysian satellite television and IPTV provider. It operates in Malaysia and Brunei from the All Asia Broadcast Centre in Kuala Lumpur and MEASAT in Cyberjaya.
Requirements
Contributing producers generally provide Astro with transmission-ready material, but most of this content is subject to editing by the broadcaster to remove offensive language and images. Astro has approximately twenty edit suites that are dedicated to editing content to comply with the cultural standards of their target audience. As most of this content is Dolby encoded, it needs to be normalized to 16-channels for edit and, once the edit is complete, the content then has to be prepared for transmission to accommodate two sets of stereo 5.1 in an 8 channel package, which necessitates Dolby E encoding.
Astro either needed to provide each edit suite with the relevant loudness and Dolby E encoding tools and plugins to complete these processes or source an external solution.
The Solution
- Engine
- 10.0
2 Engine systems, each running 3 Emotion Signal Processors, were provided to Astro by Emotion Systems. The Engine systems are first used to normalise contributed content to make it accessible to the post-production team and the output from these edits is then passed back to the Engines for preparation for playout according to their standard output configuration. The Engines were provided with watch folders to support the automation of the 60+ workflows implemented at Astro and the Engine Eclient allows the audio tools in these systems to be shared across Astro’s twenty edit suites.
Each Engine system at Astro includes the following modules:
- Loudness correction
- Channel mapping
- Conditional workflow
- File manipulation
- Upmix & Downmix
- Dolby E encode and Dolby E decode
Comment from Emotion Systems
...a great example of Engine’s flexibility.
This complex setup includes watch folders, our Eclient and integrations running at the same time to process over 60 workflows across 20 edit suites a great example of Engine’s flexibility and how easy it is to integrate our software into other workflows and systems to deliver efficiencies.