Sinclair is Accelerating News Gathering through New Production Partnership with Avid, Sony and Marquis

Sinclair is deploying innovative cloud-based news and content gathering and production workflows by combining technologies from Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID), Sony and Marquis Broadcast. This new approach leverages 5G networks to reduce connectivity costs while enriching the flow of news metadata to accelerate the speed of its news operations.

Ernie Ensign, AVP News Technology & Operations, Sinclair, explained, “Our fundamental strategy is to democratize news acquisition, with every journalist or photographer having fast content delivery to news production centers. This transformation requires a collaborative approach to streamline the workflow. We’re engaged with Avid on its MediaCentral® news production platform, Sony on cameras and C3 Portal and Marquis to enable complex workflow integrations. 

Ensign continued, “We’ve enabled real business and operational benefits, with fast story turn-around and structured metadata automatically delivered to newsrooms. Our newsrooms can cut several versions of the same story to deliver to digital platforms faster and with improved relevance. We have six stations engaged to refine the technologies and we’re continually optimizing workflows for best ROI and operational outcome. There are challenges to overcome but we’re moving closer to having access to all content in near real time. The next steps are around compression efficiency to increase quality while reducing bandwidth consumption and improving metadata transparency throughout the process.”

Fundamental to Sony’s C3 Portal news workflow is the automatic preservation and enrichment of metadata from the point of origination. C3 Portal supports pushing metadata to the camera before shooting commences; for example, iNEWS® slug information and assignment data, preserving this metadata throughout the production process when the story checks into Avid MediaCentral. Future workflows will allow rights information – and therefore genealogy – to be automatically maintained from creation throughout the edit and into archive.

Masakazu Murata, Sr. General Manager of Media Solutions Business, Sony Corporation, comments, “It has been a great pleasure for us to work with Sinclair, Avid and Marquis, striving to transform news acquisition. A closer integration of our C3 Portal with Avid MediaCentral to immediately deliver contents to edit system from camera is one of the major demands from our customers and I’m pleased to confirm we have achieved this. It’s an exciting journey of joint innovation that’s already realizing operational results for Sinclair. The new workflow will help us align the roadmap for further development of the C3 Portal. Sony continues to deliver solutions to meet and exceeds the needs of customers, by creating together with partners that provide value in the video production workflow.”

A powerful component of the new solution is the ability to send proxy video quickly back to the news production center via 5G network and Sony’s C3 Portal. The Marquis integration enables the ‘edit while record’ feature in Media Composer® so stories can be edited as soon as the proxy file starts ingesting. With a wide choice of Sony proxy resolutions, news organizations may easily take the proxy to air within seconds for fast news turnaround.

“The pressure to deliver content and get editors cutting faster is relentless. The focus of Avid’s partnership with Sony and Marquis is to pioneer new ways to quickly ingest proxy media with metadata and fetch only the required high-resolution media in a sequence,” said Ray Thompson, Sr. Director Partner and Industry Marketing for Avid Technology. “The combined offering enables lens-to-first-edit workflows to flow from Sony cameras, through Sony’s C3 Portal leveraging Marquis software to deliver proxy media and camera metadata into Avid on-premises or cloud-deployed production solutions. This includes sending content into Avid Production Asset Management environments to simplify news and sports workflows or sending content directly into the Avid | Edit On Demand SaaS platform in the cloud.” 

This novel workflow automates extraction of sequence information from the Avid low-res proxy edit. With this sequence data, Marquis will automatically retrieve the high-resolution media from either Sony’s C3 Portal, and [scheduled for 2023] also the originating camera or originating camera cards. Assuming a 10:1 shooting ratio, this partial extraction process results in a 90% reduction in 5G data transferred and network bandwidth required. Using the dynamic relink feature in Avid, the high-res content simply drops into the timeline and automatically substitutes the low-res content, thus transforming news production.

Paul Glasgow, Managing Director, Marquis, concludes, “We’re so pleased to be a core part of this initiative. In many ways, it has been a four-way partnership led by Sinclair, combined with some hard work and willingness to help from Marquis, Avid and Sony. As an example, we met with the Sony team at IBC 2022 and explained our integration strategy for Sinclair. Within days, we had access to Sony’s C3 Portal, plus a Sony camera in our labs to test alongside our Avid MediaCentral environment. It helped us accelerate our software development program, and most important of all, achieve real-world field operations by Sinclair.”

About Sinclair Broadcast

Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: SBGI) is a diversified media company and a leading provider of local news and sports. Sinclair Broadcast owns, operates and/or provides services to 185 television stations in 86 markets affiliated with all the major broadcast networks; owns Tennis Channel and multicast networks Comet, CHARGE! and TBD; and owns and provides services to 21 regional sports network brands. Sinclair Broadcast’s content is delivered via multiple platforms, including over-the-air, multi-channel video program distributors, and the nation’s largest streaming aggregator of local news content, NewsON. Sinclair Broadcast regularly uses its website as a key source of company information which can be accessed at www.sbgi.net.

About Marquis

Marquis specialises in integration services and workflow tools for broadcast and post-production, helping facilities improve the efficiency and ease of digital workflows and resolve missing workflow pieces. Our systems deliver cost-effective integration between leading broadcast content applications, ensuring standalone or shared-storage edit platforms, media asset management and automation systems all work seamlessly together. Clever software tools maximise productivity, from storage management analytics and project portability, through to management, archiving and ransomware protection. Our customers range from big studios, broadcasters, large service providers and post-production houses, right through to thousands of creative individuals. For more information, please visit 

About Sony Electronics Inc.

Sony Electronics is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America and an affiliate of Sony Group Corporation, one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world, with a portfolio that encompasses electronics, music, motion pictures, mobile, gaming, robotics and financial services. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Sony Electronics is a leader in electronics for the consumer and professional markets. Operations include research and development, engineering, sales, marketing, distribution and customer service. Sony Electronics creates products that innovate and inspire generations, such as the award-winning Alpha Interchangeable Lens Cameras and revolutionary high-resolution audio products. Sony is also a leading manufacturer of end-to-end solutions from 4K professional broadcast and A/V equipment to industry leading 4K and 8K Ultra HD TVs. Visit http://www.sony.com/news for more information.

Our fundamental strategy is to democratize news acquisition, with every journalist or photographer having fast content delivery to news production centers. This transformation requires a collaborative approach to streamline the workflow. We’re engaged with Avid on its MediaCentral® news production platform, Sony on cameras and C3 Portal and Marquis to enable complex workflow integrations. 
- Ernie Ensign, AVP News Technology & Operations, Sinclair

A closer integration of our C3 Portal with Avid MediaCentral to immediately deliver contents to edit system from camera is one of the major demands from our customers and I’m pleased to confirm we have achieved this. 
- Masakazu Murata, Sr. General Manager of Media Solutions Business, Sony

The combined offering enables lens-to-first-edit workflows to flow from Sony cameras, through Sony’s C3 Portal leveraging Marquis software to deliver proxy media and camera metadata into Avid on-premises or cloud-deployed production solutions.   
- Ray Thompson, Sr. Director Partner and Industry Marketing, Avid

We’re so pleased to be a core part of this initiative. In many ways, it has been a four-way partnership led by Sinclair, combined with some hard work and willingness to help from Marquis, Avid and Sony. 
- Paul Glasgow, Managing Director, Marquis

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