Happy World Radio Day!

This’s year’s celebration focuses on Sport.

To mark the ocassion, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has released a tool called ‘Storyboard‘ for its members.

It aims to help make the social sharing of audio easier, by providing a tool for users to add their own pictures to audio for use on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube (among others).

I was lucky enough to have been given preview access, so here are my first impressions.

Pros

• It’s good that the EBU has released something for its members, as not all stations are able to develop their own tools for social sharing.
• You are able to design your own station templates, which saves time when you want to do work quickly but still be on brand.
• It integrates with RadioDNS if you are using the visualised radio options on DAB+ in your country.

Cons

• The system is officially only available for EBU members.
• The workflow is slow, as you have to upload audio and then upload each image file individually. It took almost an hour to do my rough demonstration piece (below) – quicker with practice, but far too slow for a busy newsroom.
• I had problems navigating the workspace, even using the recommended Chrome browser.
• It seems clunky and buggy at present. For example, when opening the dialog box to remove an item, the menu remained on screen and was unresponsive.
• Although there appear to be options to add text (good for subtitles), I couldn’t get it to work. Ditto the animated waveform option.
• The preview of the project had slides in a multitrack view and showed a reasonable transition for my rough cut. The version which I exported looked nothing like the preview and had overlayed items in a way I wasn’t expecting and removed the last few elements I had added.
• The final downloaded video was called ‘video.mp4’ and not the name I had saved it on the system. This would be very unhelpful in a busy online/broadcasting environment.

I appreciate that some of this may be user error and the workflow may become quicker over time as users get more used to the system and build up stock images which they do not need to upload. However, for now, most users are probably better off using apps like WZBL or simply adding pictures in a basic video editor such as iMovie if they want to quickly, cheaply and easily create content for sharing audio online.

Here’s the first attempt. It’s not quite what I was expecting…

Jump to video transcript.

There is further information on Storyboard, including links to the free World Radio Day 2018 social media images, on the World Radio Day website.

There’s also a Storyboard overview video from the EBU.

(External video; no transcript).

However you are celebrating, I wish you a very happy World Radio Day!

• Have you used the Storyboard system? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Happy World Radio Day 2018!

This year’s theme focusses on sport, because sport can bring us all together …and so can radio.

We’re also looking at women in broadcasting, particularly sports broadcasters, such as Clare Balding from the UK, who you can currently see presenting the Winter Olympics coverage for the BBC. 

It’s also a chance to try out new technology, and the European Broadcasting Union has released ‘Storyboard’, a way to easily share your clips and audio on social media. And this is a little test of the system.

Whatever you’re doing, I hope you have a wonderful day!

Clare Balding Image Credit: Noel Samson/Wikimedia Commons.