Fourth Annual Excellence Awards
Newsroom technology – Network nominee

A large central equipment room with 450+ racks houses video and audio equipment and an array of IT gear facilitating functions such as archive, browse and access to metadata.

The system also powers all on-air data applications, including the station’s real Timestock ticker, real-time charts and boards, and the 3-D network ID bug.

CNBC selected a Thomson Grass Valley digital news production system. The NewsBrowse Web-based browsing/editing application can be accessed by up to 120 journalists. Using the system, satellite operations and media operations staff can initiate both scheduled and “crash” server recordings on 16 channels. These 16 channels of ingest are part of a Profile Open SAN system that connects to 10 NewsEdit nonlinear systems. The NLEs allow journalists to perform cuts-only editing at their desktop, create EDLs and then send them to the editors for final editing.

Once a news story is complete, editors transfer their finished files to redundant play-to-air Profile servers that all the control rooms can access. NewsQ Pro software linked to an Avid iNews NRCS controls these servers. After the story has aired, archivists move material out of the SAN to an ADIC data tape robotic system running MC/Avalon software.

Arriving analog and digital video and audio signals are immediately converted to SDI and routed through a Trinix 512x1024 digital video routing switcher, managed by an SMS-7000 control system. Three digital production control rooms are built around Sony MVS-8000 switchers with Sony DVE systems, handling Sony BVP-950 cameras.

The satellite operations control center handles up to 200 live remotes a day by communicating with 18 satellite receivers, 62 frame syncs, the Trinix digital video routing switcher from seven workstations over a private LAN.