Video Industry News

Last month we released a powerful new ISO recording upgrade to our live production platform, Grabyo Producer. But what is ISO recording, why is it important, and how can you use it to improve your productions workflow?

What is it?

ISO recording refers to the ability to create isolated recordings of your camera inputs. In live video production, you’ll record your main program output for distribution.

ISO recording means you can individually record each camera and video source which gives you more freedom in post-production. The introduction of ISO recording in Grabyo Producer means each of these recordings will be available in the Grabyo library while it’s still being recorded, and afterward, for clipping, editing, or inserting into a live production for play out.

Why would I use it?

There are many reasons why using ISO recording is beneficial in your live production workflow. It gives you the power to customize your program in post-production. 

It opens doors for making new edits, meaning you can easily clip, edit and distribute isolated camera feeds to wherever they are needed, whether that be across social platforms or back into your broadcast. It can also give you additional content from each of your cameras that you may not have used first time around, so you can repackage and use as you like. 

Automated ISO recording offers the ability to create entirely new productions with different graphics, angles, and depth and the option to localize content for different markets.

How do I use it?

Grabyo Producer offers you a quick and easy way to ISO record your production, entirely via the cloud. In Producer, all sources will be ISO recorded automatically. You can also manually select which sources you want to record in the new ‘recording’ tab in the Grabyo Producer sidebar. 

All recordings are automatically stored for seven days, and in that time, you can create assets using those ISO recordings to store indefinitely. You can also go to view your recordings directly from the Producer sidebar, or access them from your Grabyo dashboard at any time to create clips or save as VOD. All major live source types are supported for ISO recording in Grabyo Producer.

You can watch a demo on how to use ISO recording within the Grabyo platform from February’s product webinar – watch here.

For more information on how we can help you to maximize your production workflows , get in touch.

We are thrilled to announce a set of new feature upgrades for Grabyo Producer, our fully cloud-based live production platform. This update brings a host of new scene building tools for your live productions, offering new levels of customization in a simple and streamlined workflow. 

Let’s dig in!

Interactive positioning and resizing 

You can now place, move and resize any of your assets by clicking and dragging them with your mouse in the preview window. This applies to all of your production assets – live streams, remote guests, VOD assets or graphics. 

Take a look:

Cropping

Cropping your assets to fit your layout, or to optimize for playout, is now easier than ever. Once you have selected an asset, you simply press ‘C’ on your keyboard to enter cropping mode. 

Here you can apply a cropping mask to any asset. You can resize the cropping mask with your mouse, and move the asset around within the mask. 

Here’s how that looks in practice:

Preset cropping and snapping

When you have an asset you would like to crop, you are able to choose from a number of preset aspect ratios, including horizontal 16×9, vertical 9×16 and square 1×1.

Once the preset has been selected, Producer will create a cropping mask for you in the size you have chosen. You can then enter manual cropping mode (by pressing ‘C’ on your keyboard) and move the asset around within your new mask to place it perfectly.

You are also able to snap the asset to each corner and edge of the window, or place it in the centre. You can also change the opacity of each asset using the opacity slider in the display settings sidebar.

Take a look at it in action:

Flipping

While we’ve built these tools to give you more customization options, we also know that not every source you receive is perfect. Our new flipping button gives you the ability to flip objects vertically or horizontally, in case your live stream or VOD doesn’t look quite right. 

Here’s a preview of how it works:

Save your work for later

Whether you are building layouts ahead of a live show, or you find a layout you’d like to reuse and share with your team, you can save a snapshot. 

Snapshots in Grabyo save the display settings of all assets currently in the preview window, plus audio if you choose. The snapshot then becomes a source in your production layers, so you can select it and push it live in just a couple of clicks. 

Here’s an example:

And that’s that! If you have any questions about these scene building tools or would like to know more about Grabyo Producer, get in touch with us using the form below.

We are excited to announce a new feature upgrade to Producer Guest, our remote contribution app for bringing in live guests to a broadcast using Grabyo Producer. 

This update gives remote guests, commentators, talent and production crews an easy way to communicate with each other during a live broadcast. 

Here’s how it works in Grabyo Producer:

Intercom

Grabyo Producer’s new intercom feature brings a new level of collaboration to remote productions using Grabyo. 

Intercom gives directors and other members of a production team the ability to join a live production from anywhere in the world, and communicate with each other and on-air talent using their device’s microphone. 

Production crews have the choice of two audio channels – one for the crew, and one for talent. To communicate on each channel, you have the choice of push-to-talk, or you can keep a channel open with the lock function.

The crew can also choose to communicate with all on-air guests on the channel, or push-to-talk to a specific guest, such as a lead presenter.

Up to 10 Intercom users can be added to a live production, but cannot be moved into the program output, nor can they share a camera feed. Intercom users are designed to stay behind the scenes. 

Lazy Talkback

With the production team now able to communicate with on-air guests using Intercom, our new lazy talkback feature ensures the conversation can be two-way. 

On-air guests can now hold one button to speak to the production team without their audio going out live on the broadcast. They then simply release the button to bring their audio back on-air. 

This feature will be available to all remote guests that have it enabled by the production team. 

Talkback Mode

On-air talent can also customize their audio experience while appearing on a live broadcast.

Producer Guest’s new talkback mode enables each on-air guest to listen to the audio output of the program, other guests and the production team (via Intercom) in the way they prefer. 

Guests can choose to hear everything in a mixed audio output, or they can choose to split their stereo channels, and hear the program out (including other on-air guests) in one ear, and the production team intercom in the other ear.

All of these updates are designed to ensure the most seamless workflow for managing on-air talent during live broadcasts, with easy-to-use controls and an intuitive UI that builds on the ease of bringing in remote talent using Producer Guest with a single URL link. 

Click here for more information on Producer Guest. If you’d like a demo, or to learn how you can adopt this workflow for your live shows, get in touch.  

The African Cup of Nations (AFCON) ended last week with Senegal overcoming Egypt on penalties to clinch its first-ever AFCON title. Today we’re exploring how the Confedération Africaine du Football (CAF) embraced social video content to engage football fans worldwide, grow their brand, and monetize content.

Here are the five ways CAF and its social team maximized social content throughout this year’s African Cup of Nations.

1. Brought the atmosphere home

As AFCON was delayed by a year, in part to allow fans to attend games in stadiums, it was vital for the tournament to use social video to bring the famous atmosphere that has become so synonymous with the tournament. 

Fans from across Africa featured on its channels, celebrating goals inside the stadiums in their team’s colors. These videos show the true color and personality of the tournament even more so than match broadcasts on TV.

@caf.online

♬ son original – Confédération Of African

This type of content embodied the tournament’s atmosphere and allowed fans that couldn’t be in Cameroon to see their nations represented both on and off the field. For a tournament that had fewer physical fans than Euro 2020, CAF did a fantastic job of servicing each nation throughout the tournament, ensuring all fans could access content they wanted to watch.

2. Leveraged all platforms

With the rise of vertical video viewing on TikTok, Snap and Instagram, we’ve seen many sporting tournaments embracing this new style of video content creation, and CAF placed a strong focus on capitalizing on this trend. 

CAF signed a ‘first of its kind’ partnership with TikTok for the platform to become an official sponsor. This, when announced, was TikTok’s first major brand partnership in Africa, showing how powerful sport, especially football, can be across the continent. The announcement sighted that TikTok would allow fans to celebrate the tournaments’ unforgettable moments together with the platform becoming a home for the spirit and passion of these iconic sporting events.

@caf.online

♬ son original – Confédération Of African

CAF’s social team has leaned into this heavily, posting on their official channels multiple times a day throughout the tournament. Their content has been varied and impactful, hitting the tone of the platform. Short-form, behind-the-scenes content mixed with fan and match footage makes its channel highly engaging. 

Its social team has also maximized other platforms to give its fans a look behind the scenes. Throughout the tournament, they used Instagram to post behind-the-scenes content from every game published in vertical format onto its stories, allowing the fans to connect with their nation’s players.

3. Covered all bases

YouTube has long been the primary destination for sports highlights on the internet, but with over 122 million daily users, there is much more potential for video content on YouTube that can be packaged and presented in many different formats. 

CAF’s digital team used the platform to deliver various series such as the ‘goal of the day’, ‘best five assists from the group’, and ‘most likely to’, adding more value to the experience of the tournament and driving more views for its content. 

CAF’s highlights videos of the knockout rounds gained upwards of 500K views, with the final currently sitting on 1.4M at time of writing.

These results highlight trends identified in our Social Media Report 2021. We found that more extended, longer-form videos and formats worked best on this site, and CAF’s team did well to optimize their content for YouTube. 

By creating and utilizing multiple types of content and optimizing it for the platform, its social team saw great success on the platform, which led to the channel reaching over 1Million subscribers over the course of the tournament.

4. Maximized live content

Engagement peaks when events are live, and CAF utilized its social channels to broadcast premium live content, providing a communal place for fans to watch. Post and pre-match press conferences, the opening and closing ceremonies, and even some games in the round of sixteen were all broadcast live to its YouTube channel.

Streaming live matches on social media is a highly effective way to engage fans and develop a community. CAF was able to draw a global audience to its channels and allow fans to interact with each other in real time from wherever they were.

5. Delivered value for sponsors

Throughout the tournament, CAF provided its headline sponsor, Total Energies, with valuable inventory and high exposure across its social content. Its TikTok, Twitter and Instagram channels included Total Energies branding throughout its posts and used the hashtag #TotalEnergiesAFCON2021. 

Continental Tires also sponsored an ongoing content series across all CAF’s social media platforms that showed the goal, save or assist of the day. Using clear branding and a new format, this campaign was clearly distinguishable from other content produced.

@caf.online

♬ son original – Confédération Of African

Its team also focused on maximizing its partnership with TikTok by producing multiple pieces of content every day, optimized for the platform. 

The value of social media inventory has continually risen to the point it is a key pillar of any sponsor campaign. Social platforms offer highly targeted and engaged audiences, and with the right resources, rights holders and federations can produce a variety of sponsor-led content that adds value for fans and viewers. 

For more information on how we can help you to maximize your social media strategy around live events, get in touch.

We have partnered with IPSB Technology, a leading provider of sustainable solutions globally, to deliver our cutting-edge cloud-based production technology to broadcasters across Malaysia.

This partnership combines IPSB’s expertise in commercial growth of cloud and hybrid infrastructure services with our cloud-native video production platform, offering broadcasters, media publishers and rights holders a simple way to implement and adopt cloud-based workflows for video production as the world looks toward a more sustainable future. 

IPSB Technology’s vision is to be the leading global solutions provider to combine innovation, skills and technology for a more sustainable future. This mission is complimented by our platform, as we aim to democratize video production by providing a scalable and collaborative future-proof platform for video production in the cloud. 

The Grabyo platform allows broadcasters and rights holders’ production teams to work remotely from anywhere, using just a laptop and internet connection. This can enable hybrid, or fully remote workflows to produce and deliver live and real-time video flexibly and at scale, allowing broadcasters to distribute to all channels on OTT, TV and social media simultaneously. 

Our new relationship with IPSB Technology will help to remove the need to deliver live video from fixed locations, as the production infrastructure will be hosted entirely in the cloud. Building a distributed production, with team members collaborating from various locations, greatly reduces the travel needed for crew, but also talent, and also helps to mitigate the covid-constrained access to the production studio. Anyone can contribute from anywhere in the world, without the need to be on-site, reducing the carbon footprint of each production. 

This partnership comes at a time when broadcasters, media publishers, corporate, government and entertainment production teams look to streamline their workflows to keep up with consumer demand. Clients in these sectors now recognise they must focus on building sophisticated multi-channel strategies to reach consumers across the platforms they want. Our end-to-end platform for live broadcasting and clipping will allow production teams in Malaysia to deliver content across all their channels in real-time, simplifying their multi-platform strategy.

“Our clients in Malaysia are looking for new ways to move towards a more sustainable way of working and by partnering with Grabyo we are able to deliver them a product that is at the cutting edge of this. Grabyo’s cloud-based solutions allow production teams to dramatically enhance workflows, content innovation and reduce their carbon footprint.  This is something we are extremely excited to deliver to them in 2022 and beyond”

 Ms Mardhiah Nasir, Executive Director, IPSB Technolgies

For more information on how we can help to bolster your digital content capabilities, get in touch.