Chyron Unveils Future of Graphics Playout Workflows With PRIME 5

PRIME Leverages gRPC API for Bidirectional Graphics Playout Communications, Alongside Significant Engine Performance Enhancements and Innovative Designer Features

At IBC 2024, Chyron today unveiled a landmark release of its all-encompassing PRIME graphics platform – PRIME 5.0. At the crux of PRIME 5.0 is the implementation of a high-performance gRPC Playout API that revolutionizes graphic playout control and monitoring, by enabling secure two-way communication between PRIME and customers’ in-house control applications. In addition, PRIME 5 delivers innovative new design, playout, and rendering features – as well as an enhanced PRIME production engine that offers superior performance for demanding productions.

gRPC is a modern, open-source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework that can run in any environment. With the implementation of PRIME’s gRPC Playout API, Chyron is breaking the traditional control and monitoring limitations of graphics playout workflows. Crucially, gRPC provides support for fast, securely-encrypted bidirectional communication between PRIME and third-party control applications. PRIME users can utilize the same API calls they’re familiar with when working with Chyron’s Intelligent Interface protocol for control of scenes and on-air playout, while leveraging new capability to receive real-time status and updates from PRIME on channel activity, scene updates, and control operations – for total monitoring confidence from bespoke custom control systems.

“As our team worked with leading broadcasters who’ve adopted PRIME as their graphics platform of choice, we’ve seen a great desire from customers to take their custom-developed, in-house production control workflows to the next level. The PRIME gRPC Playout API addresses this need with a new dimension of real-time status updates and monitoring.” said Chris Amodei, Product Manager (PRIME) at Chyron “This specific implementation for PRIME Playout operations is only the first step. The advanced two-way communication capability of the gRPC API is opening up a whole new world of seamless, unified control operations across the Chyron portfolio. Our customers and the industry at large should stay tuned for more exciting announcements around this technology in the future.”

At both a hardware and software level, the underlying PRIME Engine has undergone an extensive optimization to deliver greater speed and performance during live productions. New PRIME hardware provides more powerful CPU and GPU resources, front-accessible drive bays enhancing usability and maintenance, and support for Windows 11 operating systems. The latest PRIME systems are expertly engineered to harness the full potential of Windows 11 LTSC, offering a streamlined operating system with minimal upgrades required.

Alongside PRIME’s enhanced hardware, the PRIME team has made enhancements to the software architecture to maximize system performance. With improvements to handling of ProRes codecs, PRIME now handles playout of ProRes media in 4K productions with exceptional reliability. Additionally, users can now fine-tune preview and program pre-load frames and cpu threads for clip playout, to dedicate more processing power to on-air program performance. The version 5 release also expands on PRIME’s intuitive HDR LUT (color lookup tables)  capabilities for matching graphics and camera visuals with the same LUT file – with expanded LUT options like Range and Interpolation properties.

On top of the landmark workflow and engine advancements, the PRIME Designer application has been further iterated upon to deliver the fluid graphic design experience that users need to stay agile in demanding production environments. In addition to a new Dark Theme that provides greater contrast and easier visibility in lower-light environments, a new Designer Tabs function enables designers to seamlessly maneuver between any scene, control panel, transition, or application logic project in the PRIME Designer interface. With new shortcut keys to control these tab elements, it’s never been easier for designers to manage and edit multiple assets at once. Another highlight improvement for designers, is the expansion of PRIME’s Adobe After Effects importer capabilities, which now allows for designation of images, text, and video layers as replaceable scene elements immediately upon import.

The final spotlight feature of the PRIME 5 release is the new JavaScript Batch Render tool, which enables PRIME to efficiently handle large-volume rendering needs for data-driven graphics – without the need for an external render engine. With this JavaScript-powered tool, users can load a scene, select specific criteria from data, and render every available graphic iteration from the selected data on a dedicated PRIME render channel. The introduction of this powerful rendering capability within PRIME will provide exceptional efficiencies for post-production needs, such as rendering out each player-specific graphic from a player stats graphic template. With cutting-edge bidirectional playout control, enhanced engine performance, and tailored improvements for graphic design, playout and rendering – PRIME 5.0 represents Chyron’s next step in real-time graphics for live production. For more information on PRIME 5.0 and Chyron’s latest innovations at IBC 2024, visit chyron.com.

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