WPVI-TV, the-ABC owned station in Philadelphia, plans to make operational a new HD digital news production facility in September.
The station currently is equipping the facility with a full complement of Grass Valley HD technology, including system infrastructure, digital news production, live production, master control and signal routing.
WPVI-TV became the first station in its market to broadcast local news in HD in 2006. The new Grass Valley systems now being put in place will support a comprehensive file-based production workflow for the station’s local newscasts and other programs broadcast in the 720p HD format.
For daily news production, the station will rely on a Grass Valley storage area network consisting of mirrored K2 Summit servers and 1000 hours of mirrored HD storage. The news production department will implement the full Grass Valley Aurora news production platform, including Aurora Ingest, 75 seats of Aurora Browse and Aurora Play software modules. HD editing will be completed with nine Grass Valley Aurora Edit and a dozen EDIUS nonlinear editing workstations.
To handle all of its daily newscasts, the station is installing a fully redundant Grass Valley Ignite HD integrated production system — complete with a 4M/E Kayak HD production switcher. Commercial insertion will be accomplished with a Grass Valley K2 master control server system with 1000 hours of storage and a Grass Valley BaseCamp browse system, which is integrated with a PathFire Digital Media Gateway system to ingest news feeds, syndicated programs and other content.
In-house HD signal distribution will be based on a newly installed Grass Valley Trinix 352 x 256 HD router, complete with embedded audio on all video paths.