CNBC Asia airs news faster with a digital workflow
Nov 1, 2006 8:00 AM
Photo: From the master control room, CNBC Asiz airs eight hours per day of live programming.
CNBC is a global TV network that provides business news and information. The network’s Asia Pacific division is based in Singapore, where seven localized feeds are created for transmission to Southeast and East Asia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. The facility broadcasts content 24/7, including eight hours of live programming. It airs the U.S. transmission feed with commercial replacement overnight and creates an NTSC version of the CNBC Asia feed. The channels are distributed by cable, satellite and terrestrial networks with transmissions in PAL.
Prior to the upgrade
In August 2005, CNBC Asia started its transition to a tapeless operation. Before the upgrade, the station prepared stories with an Avid iNEWS newsroom computer system. Camera crews in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo shot stories on Betacam SP or the station acquired footage from agency feeds. Then the station cut material using Digital Betacam VTRs with Sony 500 and 700 editors.
To play the stories to air, the station used an Odetics cart. Two Avid Media Composer systems helped with finishing promotions.
CNBC operators manually recorded agency feeds in master control. Typically, the station recorded six stories from the Reuters feed to a single tape. The journalists and editors then either shared the tape or dubbed copies, which created obvious problems during fast-breaking stories. The iNEWS database managed the news archive.
Faster turnaround
With the installation of Avid news systems, master control operators no longer have the task of feed recording.
CNBC differs from many broadcasters in the region because it has a small staff. The goal of the move to a tapeless operation was to allow the station to turn stories around faster, to make better use of the staff and to simplify maintenance issues. With the new tapeless operation, everyone could access material upon ingest.
CNBC wanted a single supplier solution that would also support thirdparty equipment to simplify ongoing maintenance. Avid supplied the media storage and editing, and supported the SGL FlashNet and StorageTek archive.
The station’s general manager, Matt McDonald, spearheaded the project. McDonald has been in the news business for 20 years and has been at CNBC in Singapore for the last six years. He was instrumental in designing the workflow and chose December 2005 as the date for the project to go live. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is CNBC’s brownout week, as it is generally a quiet time for financial and business news.
The new workflow
The station selected Avid Unity for storage, NewsCutters for craft editing and AirSpeed for transmission. The facility has 30 seats on the GigE media network, all of which allow users to browse in 25Mb/s DV format.
Journalists can now share agency feeds as soon as the stories arrive.
A key part of the project was to design the workflow and configure the user interface of Avid Media Manager. Because of the complexity of the configuration, the station decided to employ the system on-site so engineers could tinker with it and figure out the best workflow. CNBC Asia set up a test bed running alongside the legacy system.
A Sun StorageTek library with SGL FlashNet archive management replaced the videotape archive. Two librarians manage the news archive. A deletion schedule keeps the server free for new stories. All archived stories migrate to the archive library for long-term storage. Stock footage stays on the storage server.
To retrieve stories from the archive, users search the database. Once located, the archived stories can be restored to the server.
Feeds
CNBC Asia broadcasts about eight hours of live content per day, so the station has fibre connections to studios in London and the United States, as well as links to crews in Hong Kong and Tokyo. Agency feeds come from Reuters and The Associated Press. The station uses three routable AirSpeed playout servers for general feed recording .
Master control staff used to manage feed recordings to tape. Now the staff can concentrate on transmission processes. Tapes are ingested in the library and MCR using VTR control from Avid Capture Manager. All that’s left for the staff to do is enter the time codes.
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