Early in my time at Fox Sports in seemed clear that there was a need for a way to easily render items out of Vizrt’s real time renderer. Based on the requirements (audio, batch rendering, ease of use) the fastest way to get something built for production was through the Viz Template Wizard application. Though it lacked the capability of a fully built application, it still accomplished the goal in a short period of time.

Vizrt provides two ways to do the rendering, but the Matrox Clipout functionality provided audio and better control over the clip output. Vizrt doesn’t provide an interface to the clipout options, so an interface needed to be built which would allow anyone to quickly make clips.

The template makes use of multiple sockets, copies and deletes files, and starts external applications all through vbscript. The Vizrt Engine doing the rendering, the pc where the render was initialized, and the final path can all be different locations within the network.

Only a few file types are available for rendering out of a Vizrt Engine. To allow the template to convert to many different codecs FFMPEG was used. The command line structure allowed it to be easily integrated into the render workflow.