Al Jazeera Upgrades Weather Graphics With Metacast 2.0

One of the key goals for the Metacast 2.0 release was to create an even more efficient workflow for ChyronHego customers. Throughout the process of updating the product, the development team was in close discussion with key customers to learn about their experience with the product and gather their feedback. Based on these discussions, ChyronHego has drastically improved the user ergonomics for common operations in the 2.0 release — making Metacast the market’s most user-friendly weather graphics solution with no compromise in features or performance.

Metacast has always been data-agnostic, meaning the solution has the ability to work with almost any weather data source. Metacast 2.0 now includes support for NetCDF and HDF5 formats, which enables even more data sources to be used natively by Metacast. Other major updates include improved OpenGL rendering performance and enhanced file render operations. Multiple new presentation features such as Volumetric Cloud effects establish Metacast 2.0 as the solution for highly reliable and brilliantly attractive, data-centric graphics.

Creating Stunning Weather Graphics at Al Jazeera
For over five years, international news broadcaster Al Jazeera has used ChyronHego’s Metacast as a tool to produce stunning weather graphics on both its English and Arabic channels. Two teams of meteorologists produce daily weather content using Metacast to create graphics for weather bulletins, breaking news stories, and for the Al Jazeera website.

Shortly after the release of Metacast 2.0, the team at ChyronHego was able to successfully upgrade Al Jazeera’s Metacast implementation. During the upgrade, ChyronHego relied on the help of Al Jazeera senior meteorologist Steff Gaulter to ensure that the Metacast upgrade was successfully completed without any interruption to news production.

ChyronHego used the Metacast Quality Assurance System to monitor the effects of the upgrade. As performance on the same hardware more than doubled, the stability of the installation increased as well.

“Metacast 2.0 is drastically reducing rendering times and improving the user interface experience,” said Gaulter. “The team at ChyronHego ensured the upgrade was carried out smoothly, with disruption kept to a minimum. They led the upgrade, clearly setting out a schedule and making sure each step was carried out efficiently and without a hitch. Plenty of time was allowed to fully test the system to make sure there were no interruptions to our output and any issues were dealt with swiftly and proficiently. In short, we were very happy with our workflow upgrade and the efficient service we received from ChyronHego.”