One Story, Two Burlis

In our last article, we showed you some of the “big ideas” that differentiate Burli NE from Burli Newsroom – the features and ideas that make the two products unique from a conceptual point of view.

This time, let’s look at one of the most basic parts of working with Burli, and see how just working on a simple, single story is different between systems. We’re going to look at a common task, that of taking a story from newswire to on-air radio broadcast. (NE is capable of much more than radio news, but let’s start on common ground)

Capture and Edit a Story

To begin with, we’ve gone into both Newsroom and NE at the same time, and pulled the same story from ABC’s newswire in both programs.

In Burli Newsroom:

If you’re familiar with Newsroom, this will look pretty normal. You have the main text of the story, and a 23 second audio clip in the Clip 1 position at the top of the story (in the red outline).

If we want to edit that audio, we would need to copy it out to our Work folder and begin editing, and then put it back when we’re done. For now, we’ll leave it as is.

Note the name of the story is always the first line of text (blue outline). To change the name of the story, edit this line of text.

In Burli NE:

Now we see some of the immediate differences in NE. The audio clip is represented in multiple ways – not only at the top, but also in the green link in the body of the story text (in the red outline at the bottom). This lets you drag and drop the audio so it can be positioned precisely within the text. Details of the audio – its title, length and out cue, for example also appear automatically and get updated automatically. You’ll also see the title is kept in its own field (blue outline). No need to keep the title in the story text, it can be managed separately.

Finally, you’ll see a brand-new summary window (green outline) to the left of the story. This view shows an at-a-glance summary of important data about the story itself. It’s configurable, but in this example, we can see its title, length (including audio playout time), when it was last worked on (and by whom), that it has a text element, that it has an audio element, and the audio outcue. That’s a quick but powerful look at the elements of the story, and once we’ve reviewed it, it can be hidden away to save screen space.

Clicking the audio tab at the top of the story shows the cut in the audio editor right away – no need to copy, edit, and re-attach the audio.

The Prompter Mode

Our journalist has had a quick look at the story in both NE and Newsroom, and will keep the original text (and credit it on-air). She’ll also discard the extra display info, and remove the verbatim so it doesn’t appear in-prompter. She’s also decided to play the audio in the middle of the story.

We’re left with this in Newsroom (note the addition of the [CLIP] in the story body which was manually added by the user where she wanted the audio to appear in the prompter):

And we see this in NE:

We take both stories, and put them into scripts for reading on-air. Now, let’s get a look at how they both look in prompter mode.

In the Newsroom prompter:

In the NE prompter:

The user can see at a glance that the media is audio (because it’s green – we colour-code for different media types in NE, including video and lower thirds). If required, there can be separate buttons for multiple playout devices (and a dedicated Cue button to play the audio in our headphones), and there’s also a button to reset to the top of the clip if necessary.

When playing the audio clip to air in NE, this is what we see:

The play button becomes a progress bar with a countdown, showing clearly how much audio is left to play. There’s a status button to show the cut is currently Playing. Also, there’s a second timer in the top right corner that shows the play progress of a clip – even when it’s being played from a different workstation, which is great for dual anchor environments, or when a board operator fires the audio. When the cut done is finished playing, the screen shows us when and where the clip was last played.

See the Difference

We hope this helps illustrate some of the changes we’re bringing to Burli’s products, even at the most basic levels. These are the kinds of changes we’re making to Burli NE at every level of its operation, and we’re excited to bring those improvements to you.
And even more crucially different, NE is intended for more than just radio workflow. We’ll discuss this more in future articles.

To learn more, come visit us at the all-new www.burli.com for more info, or email us to get in touch.