IVORY, a services Company and creator of the Automate-IT platform, today announced that FranceÔ, a French public television network that is part of the France Télévisions group, has selected IVORY as a key technology supplier to automate and streamline their graphics workflows. The deployment seamlessly integrates with FranceÔ’s existing Aspera Orchestrator workflow automation deployment to create a single system able to ingest, process and distribute promotional content worldwide.
Previously, FranceÔ’s daily workflow was hampered by the need to manage and move large volumes of graphics produced in Adobe® Creative Cloud, raw video footage, and other large media files between geographically dispersed locations.
In production, FranceÔ relies on IVORY’s Automate-IT workstation, an innovative platform that provides simple solutions to sophisticated workflowsbased on Adobe® creative tools.Automate-IT has the unique ability to adapt to any technical workflow challenges that limit creative processes.Editorial decisions can be easily integrated within Adobe After Effects CC using a contextual Panel that offers a real-time preview and background rendering to automatically create multiple versions of promos.
Hervé Friquet, Project Manager, France Télévisions, explains: “We believed that we could go beyond simply connecting services and reinvent the way we work and collaborate as a company. We asked IVORY and Aspera to team up and port the Automate-IT HTML Panels inside an Orchestrator window and make it available from the desktop.”
Four Panels are now displayed inside an Aspera Orchestrator window available from a desktop computer, even where Adobe Creative Cloud is not running. The service includes a preview of the promo for the operator prior to the actual decision to trigger the remote generation of the render. Automate-IT factory also includes extended dashboarding and activity monitoring.
FranceÔ previously deployed Aspera Orchestrator to manage over 30 complex workflows between multiple sites around the world, benefiting from the web application’s easy-to-define rules and built-in high-speed transfer capabilities. With Orchestrator, files and assets are directed, processed and redirected using existing IT and broadcast infrastructure, making sure each processing phase is accurately performed.
The fusion of technologies from Aspera and IVORY integrate seamlessly with FranceÔ’s workflow, enabling users to simply upload their content, which will be automatically generated into several versions for distribution to multiple networks worldwide, and providing new capabilities for rendering content remotely.
Erwan Roth, France Télévisions, deputy CTO for Overseas Operations, explains: “We were looking for a solution that would be simple to integrate in our complex infrastructure without disturbing our daily deliverables; overall it was simple and cost effective, and the integration of Aspera and IVORY with our processes made perfect sense.’’
Julien Gachot, CEO, IVORY observes that “the creative and technology teams at France Télévisions had a common vision to integrate both platforms and redefine the graphics creation process, both to leverage their IT resources further and also to unleash the creativity of their creative staff.”
The professional services team at Aspera managed the integration process of Automate-IT factory, the server-based service from IVORY and integrated the HTML Panels directly inside an Orchestrator window.
“The simple yet effective integration of Aspera Orchestrator with IVORY’s Automate-IT platform provides considerable value to the creative teams at FranceÔ, who are able to optimize promo creation with Automate-IT, achieve high-performance transfers with Aspera FASP, and monitor and manage complex workflows through Orchestrator’s intuitive drag-and-drop, browser-based interface,” said Andrea Di Muzio, Director of Professional Services, Aspera.
Didier Leclerc, Artistic Director and head of the Autopromo Department, FranceÔ, concludes: “I was looking for a solution that could range from 100% manual to 100% automatic entry of data and variables, have the ability to control promo generation from a non-creative desktop, create multi-versions automatically and reduce project time-to-completion by providing automated, high-speed file transfers throughout the process. The solution from IVORY and Aspera offers all of the above. The adoption from my team was instantaneous.”
