New control room, studio take ‘NewsHour’ into HDTV
Dec 28, 2007 8:09 AM
Inside the new “Newshour” control room at the WETA Production Center three 70in Barco OverView FDR+70 display cubes are driven by a Miranda Technologies Kaleido-X multi-image display processor.
PBS’s signature nightly news show, “NewsHour,” entered the HD era Dec. 17 when it went live from a new HD studio and control room at the WETA Production Center in Arlington, VA.
The new facility, designed, planned and integrated by Communications Engineering Inc. (CEI) in Newington, VA, not only ushered in a new high-definition look for “NewsHour” but also will provide PBS with the control facilities and studio it will need to cover next year’s Democrat and Republican national political conventions in high definition.
HD Technology Update spoke with Joe Strobel, CEI senior project manager, about the project.
The new “NewsHour” set relies on six Sony HDC-1000L HD cameras with Fujinon HA27X6.5ESM 2/3in Digi high-definition studio/field lenses.
HD Technology Update: What is the background on the WETA control room and studio HD upgrade for “NewsHour?”
Joe Strobel: The facility was a full standard-definition analog facility. Years ago there was a beginning phase in which WETA began a controlled and well-thought-out digital migration project. That started with the replacement of the routing infrastructure and the intercom and set the stage for future migration. But at the end of the day, after the conclusion of that project, the control rooms were still baseband analog SD using some very old equipment.
The design was intended to provide an HD version of the “NewsHour” to PBS. As you know, that’s a one-hour show every weekday. So that’s a big presence.
This migration had to occur without affecting current air operations. This led us to the model of building a third control room for HD that handled the more enhanced metrics that apply to the “NewsHour” production.
The facility is an old building that was specifically built as a production space, I believe in the ‘50s and it has been modified many times over the years. It was very difficult for WETA to find the space to free up for a third control room. It was a struggle for all of the station's departments. It had to compress people into very limited space. WETA operations management spent a lot of time arming its people and its client, the “NewsHour” production team, preparing them for this change.
In the beginning, there were a lot of unhappy people, but through the inclusion of a lot of different players in the process, they all became excited about this thing and suddenly started wanting to know when it was all going to be done. A lot of times, as a system integration company, we are stuck in the technology and the capabilities we are going to provide from a purely technological perspective. On this project, we were able to successfully marry the more intrinsic elements that the production staff had to live with and the obstacles they faced in their former control room to the solution.
In the old control room, WETA staff literally had to climb over each other to get in and get out as segment producers would come and go as they produce the show. It’s much more productive now and full of some wonderful technology.
HD Technology Update: Could you describe the technological lay of the land in terms of monitoring, production and workflow?
Joe Strobel: From a production workflow perspective, as we began the HD control room phase of the project, WETA was already utilizing a hybrid workflow, where acquisition was typically tape, most of it was ingested and morphed into a nonlinear workflow for preproduction and post production of the segments that would go into a composite show.
In many cases, these finished elements were pushed over to a server for playout, but being a hybrid in many instances a lot of them were then dumped back to tape and played in as tape segments.
WETA significantly empowered the workflow to be 100 percent file-based. Once it is in the file-based system, the station can take it all of the way to air in this form. Previously, it could not do this. There are extensive upgrades in the editing suites to allow the station to be HD capable. Upgrades were performed on a few suites to sustain this launch, and WETA will continue the process of converting additional editing suites. One of the key areas where WETA had to add capacity was in supporting the ability to take the finished nonlinear product, keep it in a file form factor, move it within the facility as a file and play it directly into the show. The station can now do this.
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