[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1juC1zdanM[/youtube]

 

“Enjoying Everyday Life,” the flagship television program from Joyce Meyer Ministries, airs around the world on more than 500 stations and networks in more than 70 languages. With such wide distribution, it has a potential global broadcast audience of 4.5 billion people — two-thirds of the world.

Late last year, Joyce Meyer Ministries began transitioning to a file-based model for delivering “Enjoying Everyday Life” to stations and networks. Making the transition from using traditional videotape formats to digital files was a significant change, and engineers quickly realized that, because of all the different file requirements from stations and networks, they would need an enterprise-level, broadcast-quality transcoding solution to keep up. The new encoding system not only had to be able to automate workflows, but also to deal accurately with closed captioning — from source files to final output formats — regardless of frame rate and/or resolution of the final transcoded formats.

Custom Delivery Requirements Pose a Potentially Costly Challenge
One catalyst for the move to file-based delivery was to meet the requirement of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the world’s largest religious network, to provide a 27:30 length show. “Enjoying Everyday Life” is a 28:30 length show, so TBN’s requirement could mean additional editing, which would translate to additional time and cost.

“Joyce Meyer Ministries creates more than 300 unique episodes of ‘Enjoying Everyday Life’ each year. The prospect of having to create a custom-length program for TBN would mean more workload for our team, and more expense for the ministry, something we wanted to avoid,” says John Pipes, the show’s senior producer. “At the same time, TBN is critically important to the show, so there was no question that we would accommodate the network’s requirements.”

File-based Caption Retiming Tackles the Problem
Producers needed to shave one minute off of every program without additional editing, so the search began for a cost effective workflow that would automate the process — and the solution that was found was Wohler’s Tachyon® Wormhole™. In fact, Joyce Meyer Ministries was the first customer of this new evolution in file-based retiming.

Tachyon Wormhole is a collaborative product from Wohler and Cinnafilm. Powered by Wohler’s RadiantGrid, Tachyon Wormhole is a retiming solution that automatically adjusts the runtime of file-based media assets by up to plus or minus 10 percent, preserving not only video and audio quality but also closed caption integrity.

Wohler’s Tachyon Wormhole: How It Works
The Tachyon Wormhole time-compression process is entirely automated and performs the following tasks without any human involvement:
• High-quality deinterlacing of interlaced video streams
• Phase-correlated motion analysis of the video stream to determine content movement and to calculate where the content should land in order to meet the reduction in run time
• Automatic retiming and pitch correction of audio
• Automatic retiming of closed captions
• Automatic transcoding

Tachyon Wormhole processes files according to a workflow template that tells it how to analyze/convert videos, how to apply audio retime processing, and how to retime closed captioning in order to stay in sync with the audio. The workflow template also instructs whether the file will be stored locally, sent to our Network-attached Storage, or delivered via FTP.

Undeniable Results With Wohler’s Tachyon Wormhole
The people at Joyce Meyer Ministries said it best.  “The ability to time-compress content with an automated process using Tachyon Wormhole saved us a lot of time and money. As a non-profit, these are both big wins, TBN is a very important outlet for ‘Enjoying Everyday Life.’ says John Pipes, senior producer, Joyce Meyer Ministries. “Without Tachyon Wormhole, we would have to edit each of our 300 shows individually for length — incurring higher costs and straining our team’s workload. But this remarkable tool handles the time compression automatically and without any dropped frames, noticeable artifacts, or denigration of the original material.”

“The Wohler team worked right beside us to accurately translate our workflow needs into a system with a high-speed video pipeline. The final output goes onto a NAS delivery endpoint for distribution through FTP to television stations around the world, our desire was to blend rock-solid reliability with significant speed into an enterprise-level file-based delivery system with constant uptime. We have not been disappointed in the least,” said Eric Grau, broadcast manager, Joyce Meyer Ministries.