Chyron announced the successful launch of its PRIME Platform as the new, state-of-the-art graphics system for NBC Sports at its Stamford, Connecticut headquarters. The project is unique in that it represents a genuine collaboration that has produced a superior graphics design and playout solution especially tailored to the high demands of top-tier live sports broadcasts.
   

NBC Sports, like many sports broadcasters, was using Chyron's legacy graphics offering, Lyric, known for its rapid recall and playout capabilities. "With a switch to PRIME, we were able to refine and modernize our workflow without compromising the design, playback speed, and functionality that our designers and operators were accustomed to with Lyric," states David Melfi, director of graphics integration, NBC Sports and Olympics. "As NBC Sports began outlining key requirements with the Chyron product team, the collaboration led to much more robust feature sets. Working to understand the requirements from every angle, the Chyron product team rose to the challenge and also brought new ideas to the table."

Key requirements included operator access focused solely on playout with limited design-editing capabilities, speed and efficiency for preparation and playout, and new possibilities for stunning graphics to support storytelling.

As with most live sports production, speed of playout operation was another key requirement. NBC Sports wanted to keep all of the tried-and-true keyboard shortcuts that their operators had become accustomed to with Chyron Lyric. Many of these were already available in PRIME, with the rest added for this implementation along with new keyboard functionalities.

Tripp Dixon, NBC Sports vice president and creative director, commented: "Sports requires a unique level of visual excitement, not necessarily better or worse than news graphics, just different and perhaps more challenging."

Although PRIME is already known for an extensive design feature set, the Chyron team knew that they needed to deliver some additional high-powered creative tools. To create unique visual excitement as graphics play on or off, PRIME now can couple the use of clips as masks with the auto-follow feature, along with native logic-building capabilities, enabling NBC Sports to create some unique transition animations for their graphics. Another well-received feature, Warp Clips, allows the import of .png sequences from a third-party application, such as After Effects or Cinema 4D, that may then be applied as an effect to a PRIME scene. NBC Sports has utilized this feature in Chyron Lyric in the past to create Emmy award-winning animated graphics effects, and its creative team is already working on new uses for this feature, now available in Chyron PRIME.