MUMBAI: Zee News has upgraded its newsroom with two VertigoXmedia products, the Xmedia Suite for graphics automation and a VertigoCG unit, to render and play out the graphics. Vertigo's Creative Services team also will take an active role in the installation by redesigning Zee News' on-air look.

"We considered several graphics automation systems currently on the market and found that Vertigo provided us with the best solution for our application," said Zee Network's director, news group, Laxmi Goel. "With its template-based approach to graphics automation, the Xmedia Suite is exactly what we need to achieve greater levels of efficiency and consistency in our unique station branding. Upgrading this branding with the help of Vertigo's design team will help underscore our role as one of the most popular brands in India."

Vertigo's Xmedia Suite provides Zee News with a set of tools for automatically creating, managing, and playing out real-time, dynamic broadcast graphics. It acts as a centralized asset management system, storing and managing all digital assets as well as real-time data feeds from virtually any source. The Zee News staff can design new templates with simple drag-and-drop operations, linking them to live data feeds so that the system automatically generates up-to-date graphics, states an official release.

The VertigoCG installed at the Zee News facility is a low-cost, full-featured graphics system that provides performance levels rivaling that of much more expensive character generators and graphics platforms. Used in conjunction with other products in the Xmedia Suite, the VertigoCG provides master control and production graphics as well as video playout capabilities for a wide range of advanced real-time broadcast applications.

It combines broadcast-quality video hardware with a real-time software rendering system, an easy-to-use authoring environment, and a flexible on-air control interface.

Vertigo's Creative Services team has created informational graphic designs in the most demanding television broadcast environments, including high-profile election campaigns and major sporting events. World-renowned for its expertise in executing design concepts, the Creative Services team swept the News, Out-of-House, Informational Graphics category of the 2005 BDA North America Design Awards, the release adds.