Chyron PRIME 4.8 Streamlines Live Production, Targeting High-Volume, Data-Driven Graphics Workflows

MELVILLE, N.Y. — July 25, 2023 — Chyron today announced the 4.8 release of the PRIME Platform, the newest iteration of the company’s powerful live production engine. Updates in PRIME 4.8 introduce an array of new options and capabilities that make it even easier for broadcasters to script, design, playout, and automate complex, data-driven graphics at scale.

“Our PRIME Platform is the engine behind many of today’s most-watched sports and news productions. Updates in version 4.8 are the direct result of conversations with our enterprise clients, taking a deep look at their demanding production environments, and developing features that will yield the greatest efficiency gains,” said Nikole McStanley, product portfolio director at Chyron. “PRIME 4.8 vastly simplifies the scripting connection between the latest data APIs and graphics, streamlines playout across multiple broadcasts, and distills repetitive, high-volume design work down to one-time operations — these are massive time savings across every step of the broadcast graphics chain.”

The PRIME Platform is a dynamically customizable and scalable solution designed to provide the functionality and resources broadcasters need to create graphics, manage content, and drive all the dynamic production elements that captivate viewing audiences. Working with PRIME, production teams can use the same industry-leading design features to create and animate stunning CG graphics, video walls, touchscreen graphics, branding, and all-in-one productions on a single platform.

With industry-leading data providers for sports and news increasingly adopting JSON data as the format of choice for their API connections, JavaScript is becoming the de facto scripting language to parse, evaluate, and access data in live graphics. To that end, PRIME 4.8 introduces a brand-new JavaScript Effect & Resource tool. It provides an intuitive interface to import and edit scripts entirely within PRIME and apply them as parameters at the object, scene, project, and application level. Additionally, the platform gains new scripting security settings to ensure the utmost security in cloud and on-prem deployments.

For playout operators, 4.8’s most significant addition is the Replaceable Panel, an alternative to a custom control panel that populates automatically with a scene’s replaceable elements — providing rapid edit access to text, images, and style values — and control over external updates and data-bindings. For broadcasters who adapt a single package across varying programs (such as different sports coverage), support for multiple graphic subfolders makes it easy to drive all your productions from a single project, utilizing identical numeric recalls for the playout every show.

PRIME’s recent auto-follow feature additions are a huge benefit to designers in crafting complex graphics that are adaptable to varying stats. PRIME 4.8 builds on this quality of life with the virtual group effect that bounds separate scene object positions together for a one-time design of table graphics with changing rows and columns. In addition, a target anchor setting fine-tunes object positioning, such as equally spacing center-justified text across multiple columns. Other design improvements include a new date/time count-up mode and new tools to dictate the overlap of layer masks across back-to-back scenes.

For automated productions driven by external updates or Chyron’s Intelligent Interface protocol, the introduction of message ranges saves hours of operator time by eliminating the design requirement for hundreds of graphics variations. Rather than creating every graphic file on disk, designers can create a single playout recall range that will reference a parent scene template. When a data update or playout command hits PRIME targeting a numeric recall within that range, PRIME temporarily generates the requested graphic and plays it out on-air. For productions driven from the newsroom, PRIME 4.8 exposes the recently added Table Resource as a replaceable element within a scene, making this data available and editable in the NRCS via Chyron’s CAMIO workflow or updatable via automated production controls.

To optimize final broadcast outputs, new color-grading tools across all PRIME input and output channels enable users to import and assign the same LUT (Look Up Table) file presets in-use on their video feeds to PRIME graphics — resulting in the perfect HDR output without the need for downstream conversion hardware. Lastly, PRIME can now render clips directly from the playout interface in any of PRIME’s supported codecs, with support for region-of-interest export to optimize file sizes.

For full details on all the latest features, visit the PRIME 4.8 Overview Page.