It's Almost Here!

Back in the spring, I blogged about our plans to transition the KTAB/KRBC News Departments into a "Digital Newsroom" operation.

Well, the transition is almost complete!  By the end of this month, we will "go live" with our new tapeless JVC Professional camcorders (which record broadcast-quality HD video onto small memory cards), brand-new Avid Newscutter editing workstations, new ingest/playback servers, new edit suites...etc.  It's the whole nine yards!  (For those that don't know, Avid is the company that basically invented computerized, digital editing for the professional broadcast and cinematography markets.  Most major news operations worldwide, as well as most Hollywood movie studios, use Avid editing software.)

Ya'll might be wondering how this will affect what you see when you watch our newscasts.  In a nutshell, things won't change much for the viewing audience.  While stations in larger cities are producing local newscasts in High Definition, our newscasts will still be aired in "standard definition" for some time to come.  This is true of most smaller t.v. markets such as Abilene.  We've spent millions of dollars in the past few years upgrading our facilities for "digital television," including the ability to broadcast CBS and NBC network programming in HD, but it will take millions more to fully outfit our studios for complete local HD programming.  It will happen some day, just not in the very near future.

What our "Digital Newsroom" upgrade will provide, however, is much more efficiency in the way we deliver the news.  Our old, tape-based cameras are just that....old.  As are our current generation of editing computers/servers.  They break down a lot, and getting raw news footage from the camera to the editor is time-consuming.  If you shot 10 minutes of video at the press conference or car wreck, it takes 10 minutes for that video to "capture" to an edit computer.  That's not good if it's 5:55 and you're video is supposed to be the top story for the 6pm news!  With our new equipment, editing will be pretty much instantaneous.  Insert the SDHC memory card into the edit computer, and start editing right away!  You'll have the top story video ready in just a minute or two!  Not to mention, all of our equipment is new and under warranty.....so we won't have to worry about breakdowns for a while!

In many ways this is an evolutionary step for us, since we've already been "halfway" digital for the past 5 years.  Our current, very old cameras record the news on videotape in the field, just like it's been done for the past four decades.....we then "capture" that video in real time to our current, older Avid computer workstations.  Then the stories are digitally edited, and sent to a hard drive server system for playback during our newscasts.  We were, and still are, the only news stations in the Abilene market to eliminate videotape from the editing and playback processes.  Ironically, our competition has been doing the reverse of us for a number of years....shooting news in the field using tapeless cameras, but using conventional videotape for the editing and playback processes.

For the next couple of weeks, we're putting the final pieces together, making sure all the equipment is in and working properly, and LOTS of training!  Below is a picture of one of our new Avid Newscutter version 10 workstations.  Once we're "live," I'll post pictures of the complete operation!