TV Studio

A straight news read, a reported package, a bullet rundown, a timeline, an explainer built on numbers, or a piece built around quotations. Choose the shape and it writes to that shape, in Modern Standard Arabic, scene by scene.

A news read stays tight to the confirmed facts; a reported package is allowed more colour. Whichever you choose, the script is written to be read aloud, and the graphics stay readable on screen.

Paste in copy you already have, pull from the stories your own newsroom filed today, or start from a subject and let it draft. Most desks use the middle one, because it keeps the package tied to reporting the newsroom actually did.

If your desk cares about provenance, start from your own filed stories: every line then traces back to something a reporter or an agency actually wrote.

Every scene in the script is taken separately and searched against the whole archive — what was said on the tape, what is visible in it, and who is in the frame. What comes back is a specific shot with specific in and out points, not a folder to go through.

A tape of a flooded street may never say the word flood out loud. You can still find it.

A shot of a minister speaking to camera and a shot of the ministry building make very different claims. The system treats them as different requests and judges them by different standards.

A soundbite has to be the person named, in their own voice, and long enough to breathe. Illustration is held to a lower bar and labelled as illustration. Confusing the two is how a package ends up appearing to quote somebody who never said the words.

If the line names one figure and the footage shows another, the shot is rejected outright — however well it fits in every other respect.

Person substitution is the single most damaging mistake a package can make — two leaders at the same summit, filed under the same event, described in the same words. It is checked before anything reaches you.

Each match arrives labelled with how strongly it carries the line — whether it proves the point, merely sets the scene, or could not be supported at all. You can see at a glance which parts of the package are solid and which need a producer.

The grade changes what an editor does next. A proof-grade match can be approved and left alone. A context-grade match is fine over a general line and wrong over a specific accusation. The distinction is the difference between a package that survives a complaint and one that does not.

Under each chosen shot sits everything else that was considered, in order, with the reason each ended up where it did. Disagreeing takes one click.

This is the part producers end up trusting most. A choice you cannot inspect is a choice you cannot overrule — so everything is on the table, including the shots it rejected and why.

A shot already used earlier in the package is set aside in favour of something else, so a two-minute report does not lean on the same twelve seconds three times.

The same rule applies across a bulletin, not just within one package, so two reports in the same programme do not open on the identical wide shot of the same building.

When nothing recent fits, it searches the deep archive as a second pass and marks anything it finds there clearly, so nobody mistakes a file shot for today's pictures.

File footage is legitimate and every newsroom uses it. What causes trouble is using it without saying so — here it is marked while somebody is still looking at the package.

The script can be read aloud scene by scene in a voice you have set up, so a rough cut has real timings rather than estimated ones. Replace it with a presenter's read whenever the booth is free.

It reads the script and works out which lines want a graphic at all — a date sequence wants a timeline, a set of figures wants a number panel, a strong line of testimony wants a quotation card. Then it drafts them in your own brand and places them against the scenes they belong to.

This is the part that usually blocks a package: a producer can find the pictures alone but cannot build the graphics alone, so the piece waits for the graphics desk. Here the visualisation already exists as a draft in your brand. The graphics desk edits rather than builds.

Timelines, number panels, quotation cards, comparison bars, maps and plain title cards — the working set a news bulletin actually uses. Each is a template in your brand rather than a look the system invents.

Which one a line gets is a suggestion you can override in one click, and the same fact can be re-rendered as a different form when the producer disagrees. A figure that reads better as a bar than as a number panel is a judgement call, and it stays a judgement call.

Approved scenes are laid out on a timeline in order, trimmed to the shot boundaries, with the voice track underneath. From there it opens straight in ProEditor for a human to finish.