Obstacles on road to local HD news not as impassable as imagined, Hand says
May 8, 2007 8:00 AM
Putting a local HD newscast on the air is a sizable undertaking, but not as big of a challenge as it would have been without the help of others who had done so already, said WSOC-TV chief engineer Ted Hand.
The Charlotte, NC, station, which took its newscasts to HD last month, is the latest Cox Television station to offer its local news in HD. According to Hand, the station benefited from the HD experience of those at the group’s stations in Atlanta and Orlando.
Hand shared some of that insight with HD Technology Update.
HD Technology Update: What were the top engineering considerations made when WSOC decided it wanted to produce its local news in HD? And did the experience of other Cox Television stations producing local HD news help you address those considerations?
Ted Hand: We thought it was important to have as many HD sources as possible. We didn’t want to just have a couple of studio cameras and that be it. We wanted as many possible sources as we could. We have HD studio cameras, HD tower cameras, HD helicopter, HD graphics, including HD Viper Radar and WSI Weather — all HD. The only thing that we currently are not in HD with is gathering news ingested in the field, but we are showing that in 16:9, 480.
As far as our Cox stations WSB in Atlanta and WFTV in Orlando, we used those resources greatly. We visited their sites and they sent people up to us and helped us out on this end. So, that was an enormous resource for us.
They had showed us some of the bumps we might encounter so we didn’t have to fight them alone. They had already fought those battles before we got there.
HDTU: What sort of bumps?
TH: It was mostly being an ABC affiliate with Cox. We run at 720p instead of 1080i, so there was a lot of crossconversion that we had to do. Some of the cameras we had were 1080i only, so we had to crossconvert those. There were workflow issues with how to use the P2 cameras. We take that in as 16:9. How you are going to ARC (aspect ratio convert) that, and how to do the workflow — center cut, put wings on that.
And the other Cox stations had already figured out the workflow before we got there.
HDTU: Currently, you are shooting 16:9 SD in the field and upconverting to HD. Under what circumstances would it make sense to transition ENG to HD acquisition?
TH: Our bottleneck is how we edit back at the station. We have the ability. The cameras we have are HD P2, but we are running them at 16:9 SD. So, the cameras are there. We are able to record it and get it back.
Our biggest problem, or bottleneck, is the actual editing system. Our current Avid system doesn’t do HD, so we will have to upgrade our nonlinear editing in house and playout for it.
It’s more of a donut. Everything in the field that records is in place and everything that distributes it and shows it on the air is in place — it’s that part in the middle that we have to upgrade.
HDTU: At the same time the station was transitioning to HD for its newscast, it was moving to a file-based workflow. Did the simultaneous transition make it easier or harder to launch local newscasts?
TH: That came about after a great deal of discussion, and it was decided that we would just swallow the whole thing at one time. It was thought to just chew it off and get done with it and get through it, because if we had gone tape-based, then we would have to cross that bridge again.
We thought it was better to just have the cameras shoot 16:9 and go ahead and go P2, do the workflow on it and just get it all in place. Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It wasn’t plug-and-play, but it wasn’t the big disaster that I thought it might have been.
If I had to do it all over again, I would do it the same way. When it comes to things like that when you are trying to do two or three things, like when you go from tape to servers and you’re going to automation, I’ve always found that it’s better to corral all that stuff at one time and climb the hill at once and be done with it.
HDTU: Where does WSOC stand with the 2GHz BAS relocation?
TH: We have currently put the package together and submitted it to Nextel, and I’m expecting the contract any day now.
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