medialoopster Media Asset Management optimizes the cross-location production of social media videos at Deutsche Welle – in 30 languages, with employees from 60 nations.
As Germany’s foreign broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW) independently conveys a journalistically comprehensive picture of Germany and presents global events and developments from a European perspective. Every week it reaches a total of about 162 million people worldwide in 30 languages.
In Germany, DW produces its programme content in Berlin and Bonn. Every day, over 200 hours of video material with the corresponding metadata are received here via various ingest channels. Since 2018, DW has been using the Media Asset Management System medialoopster at both editorial offices to manage HD video content flexibly and easily. medialoopster offers a modern HTML5 interface. Journalists therefore only need a web browser to browse the content and prepare it for video editing. If the video content at one location is not available in HiRes quality, it can be shared with the other location via medialoopster.
Faster due to integration into the editing system
To prepare the HiRes cut, journalists can make a rough cut at their office workstation in advance with the help of the medialoopster Rough Cut Editor, also based on HTML5. This measure can significantly reduce editing times with Adobe Premiere Pro. Using the integrated medialoopster panel (plugin), journalists are also able to directly access the content managed by medialoopster from 80 Premiere Pro stations. When the clip is exported, all metadata is taken from the source material because it is immediately returned to medialoopster via the medialoopster panel. The metadata cycle is thus closed and traceable.
Even more efficiency through integrated workflows
With a seamless integration of the workflow and project management tools Helmut FX and Helmut IO with medialoopster, further workflows could for the first time be intelligently integrated with each other. Helmut IO offers the possibility to transfer video content with metadata directly to medialoopster. The same applies to Adobe Premiere Pro projects created by Helmut FX, which can now be addressed directly to medialoopster. The projects are then managed by medialoopster and comfortably monitored by the DW administrators, e.g. via medialoopster housekeeping. Helmut FX and IO use the open interface (REST-API) of medialoopster for this workflow.
The medialoopster REST-API is also used for the interaction between medialoopster and the OpenMedia editorial system. A separate middleware was created to transfer the metadata to OpenMedia in defined time intervals in a predefined XML schema. In the course of this data transfer, medialoopster’s own XML processor is used, which simplifies the import and export of metadata to and from medialoopster on the basis of an XSL transformation.
Optimal Usibility
The DW administrators were able to build up sufficient medialoopster know-how in the course of the project, which enabled them to set up not only the installation of medialoopster, but also the configuration of medialoopster workflows independently within a very short time. Updates and upgrades are of course also carried out by DW administrators. In the meantime, this is done without interrupting production, even while the system is running.
Fabian Hoffmann, Project Manager at DW, summarizes:
“medialoopster makes a significant contribution to standardizing and accelerating cross-location collaboration and production processes. Recurring work steps to make our content usable for social media channels, e.g. adaptation into several languages, have been greatly simplified. Once you understand the “medialoopster” principle, it’s easy to install and configure. This enables us to react quickly to new user requirements. nachtblau is the right partner and medialoopster is the right tool for this purpose”.