The Central Ingest Station is the primary place for ingest operations. It's usually located in a room where all new content is brought to. A team of ingest specialists bringing files from various storage devices into the sales and delivery environment uses several dedicated workstations. While doing so, files are previewed, selected, pre-cut, and stitched. Technical metadata is automatically generated and descriptive metadata is added manually. The product used for that is Woody IN2IT access. It can transcode and re-wrap the files in the platform-internal format.

A variant of central ingest is offered when the source devices are attached to a server or files are being moved there before the ingest operations. In this case, Woody IN2IT exchange is the right choice. Most often via watch folders, new files are detected and automatically ingested with standard metadata. If metadata is to be manually set, Woody IN2IT access can act as a client to IN2IT exchange.

In other cases, the need is more about starting an automatic workflow for a bunch of files. In this case, x-dream-media's Workflow Starter allows you to remotely browse, preview, select and segment video files via a WebGUI. Compared to Woody's IN2IT, the x-dream-media Workflow Starter sends the files for processing to x-dream-media's Workflow Manager (WFM). WFM orchestrates transcoding, re-wrapping, QC, virus scanning and other operations. It's usually used to manage larger amounts of material.

Besides the central ingest, desktop or kiosk ingest offers journalists and creatives to bring source material into the production environment from their workspaces or dedicated computers close to their desks. A dedicated computer allows addressing the risk of viruses professionally. Furthermore, it saves costs when expensive storage devices like Sony XDCAM HD are required. The functionality provided is identical to the central ingest desks. The product of choice is again Woody's IN2IT access in combination with x-dream-media's WFM and other tools for virus scanning and QC.

To serve a larger number of journalists at their desks for occasional ingests, the Upload web client of IN2IT exchange is a cost-effective alternative. Please see "Remote Journalists" below.

There is the saying "What happens, happens first on YouTube". So, ingesting social media content is taking content from end-user publishing portals back to production environments. Often, a journalist has found an item of interest and faced the challenge of retrieving and ingesting the file. Download tools can be used in combination with the usual ingest tools. A more efficient method is using one integrated tool. In our solution, we use Woody IN2IT social for directly downloading and ingesting from social media and web portals.

Live sources can be provided by satellite feeds, lease line or studio transmissions. Traditionally, video is provided as HD-SDI signals. Nowadays we can find SMPTE 2110 or NDI sources too. The recording usually happens as a "crash-record" or scheduled record. For a fully integrated multi-camera or multi-feed recording, our solution is based on Woody IN2IT live ingest software. It supports the recording of SDI, NDI, SMPTE 2110 studio signals and many types of web streams.

When metadata handling and integration is less important during live recording x-dream-media's Broadcast Recorder is a perfect alternative for recording to disk and processing via x-dream-media's WFM workflow orchestrator.

For connecting remote interview guests from their mobile phones, laptops or PCs, we provide you with MultiCAM's AirBridge. It converts your master control room to a video call-in center. For more static or reoccurring connections, Medialooks Video Transport is the video engineers Swiss knife.

Even though tape might be dead, archives often still consist of tapes. Sometimes tapes are still used in production or for transportation. Consequently, our ingest solution addresses this by making use of recording software in combination with x-dream-media's WFM for ingest workflows or Woody's IN2IT exchange for PAM ingest.

Although journalists in the field and contributors provide content occasionally and in smaller volumes, there are many of them. Therefore, a simplified way to up- and download video files with related metadata is required. Tools have to be accessible globally and intuitive to use. We address these needs by Woody' upload WebGUI for IN2IT exchange. It allows to contribute from remote directly into the production chain as an operator on-site would do.

A special variant of remote ingest is offered, when firstly a workorder is received and afterwards a production result is handed back. In this case, x-dream- Fabrik PROXCHANGE is a brilliant solution for extending on-premises workflows by integrating external production partners. A workorder is received via a so-called exchange job. These are communication threads that are restricted to individual users or groups. They take in the essence files to work on and further metadata that describes the workorder. The contributor has access to their communication jobs as a permanently registered user or an operator invites them to a temporary room.

Staff in remote offices or production facilities require tight integration into the systems of the main facility in order to be as productive as possible. Larger facilities can be equipped as the main facility. Smaller facilities get provided with a fully featured but smaller scale system. In both cases, the users interact with a local system that sends and retrieves the files and metadata to and from the main facility as a background process.

Today news agencies and other B2B content supplier deliver their assets whenever possible via internet. News agencies most often supply a server to receive their content. Other suppliers utilize legacy FTP or UDP accelerated transport (e.g. Signiant or Aspera). In contrast to movie production content security is most often less relevant. But speed and flexibility matter! Our ingest to news production and publishing has connectors to all relevant news feed suppliers. Based on existing frameworks any other supplier can be easily connected.

After files and metadata have been ingested, fully automated actions can take place, such as transcoding and re-wrapping to a house format or browsing proxies, quality control, audio processing (e.g. normalising), or video processing (e.g. standard conversions). Advanced actions like audio transcriptions for timed metadata and subtitle creation, translations of metadata and subtitles or face recognitions can be added for automatic metadata creation. Finally, assets (files + metadata) are handed over to the production system(s). For instance, while a high-resolution file is moved and checked into the production asset management system (e.g. Interplay PAM), a low-resolution browsing proxy is made available to the media asset management system (MAM) or the newsroom control system (NRCS).

Journalists have access to all incoming audiovisual feeds from the web UI of the News Room Control System (NRCS). They can add audio, video, graphic files to the stories they are working on. This information gets synchronized with no delay to the Production Management System (PMS). Both systems share the same web user interface. Thus, journalists can pre-cut stories in the low-resolution rough-cut editor of the PMS without leaving their desk. Voice-over can be added but needs to be recorded in a silent environment. The result can be conformed as a server-side process at any time. Afterwards a new asset becomes available for publishing.

Alternatively, journalists could open Adobe Premiere (or any other editing suites) on their PCs and access the exact same story-related file collection via a panel integration to the PMS. Now they have all the flexibility in editing offered by a professional editing application. To make the editing result available for publishing they just need to render the timeline and move it back to the story bucket.

The craft editing technically equals the high-resolution journalists editing but takes place in dedicated rooms with professional audio and video monitoring as well as audio recording equipment.

News production follows a well-defined production process that consists of manual journalistic work, automated processing and human interactions. For instance, it is not allowed to publish or air the story prior to review and approval by a chief editor and head of news. Such business processes can be "implemented" within the Production Management System. Once a story is edited, all relevant persons are notified automatically and asked for approval. In case of a disagree, the journalist and editors are notified, feedback information is provided and changes to perform are requested. On approval, the content is automatically made available to the publishing and playout systems, the NRCS is notified as well. The system continuously informs supervisors about the progress.