Satnews Daily
September 14th, 2009

SatBroadcasting: iTX Iteration Is Impressive For Production + Playout


OmniBus logo OmniBus Systems is launching iTX 1.3 at IBC2009 with more than 130 feature enhancements that extend the Company's software-based production, automation and playout system. iTX replaces all the components of a transmission chain — automation system, video server, vision mixer/DVE, stills store, audio clip store, character generator and graphics devices, logo inserter, aspect ratio converter, encoders and up/down converter — with a single, unified software suite running on industry-standard IT servers. With version 1.3 of the iTX software, major functionality has been added in several areas to extend the system's capabilities for a wide range of primetime broadcasting applications. Third-party manufacturers including Dolby Digital®, Nielsen, rtSoftware and Ideas Unlimited continue to license important plug-in functionality to the iTX platform, adding powerful integrated capability in audio processing, digital watermarking, real-time graphics ,and compliance monitoring.

New features in iTX include increased support for third-party schedule imports from systems such as Pilat Media and Pro-Bel, with automated backup schedule substitution capability; support for external HSM archives (DIVA, SuitcaseTV); and a range of enhancements for iTX's full-featured graphics functionality including dynamically updating multiple crawls and datafeeds from external sources, multiple animated TARGA sequences and logos and animated in/out transitions for each graphic element. A powerful new audio processing engine delivers multi-stream PCM and AC3 capability, remapping and processing of streams with full 16-channel embedded output, automatic multi-language mapping using language tags in Omneon MOV files and desktop preview monitoring of multi-channel audio streams. iTX's operational flexibility is further enhanced by new features such as monitoring of commercial minutes against a defined value in the schedule, VANC data handling, automatic mirroring of a parent channel schedule and increased support for hard panels and external graphics devices and video servers.