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Production
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Flagship newscast goes HD
Smooth transition for 'NewsHour'
Feb 14, 2008
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by James Careless
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For WETA, a PBS flagship station that serves the Washington, DC, area from its facilities in Shirlington, VA, making the switch from SD to HD was akin to the old saying about reacting to challenges by acting like a swimming duck -- stay calm and unruffled above the water, but paddle like hell below it.
When the station broadcast The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in HD for the first time on Dec. 17, 2007, PBS viewers saw a familiar, professional newscast in all of its new 1080i glory. What they didn't see was the hard paddling by the station's engineering department and its systems integrator, Communications Engineering, Inc., led by CEI project manager Tom Hackett. In the months leading up to the switch, both labored to build a new HD control room and prep the studio and its staff for making the leap.
Why did WETA decide to make the multi-million dollar move now? "We were already in the middle of a three-year cycle to renew the facility," explained Chris Lane, WETA's vice president of engineering and technology. "We have already upgraded the station's router and intercom system from analog to digital. With that done, we had completed the station's HD 'nervous system' and had to pick what we would do next.
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| WETA's new audio control room is built around SSL's C100 5.1 surround sound console. |
"PBS then began asking when we would like to take the NewsHour to HD. Well, we had already planned to put in an HD/SDI switcher to have a migration path in place for HD, but PBS' requests motivated us to move up our transition."
To do the job, WETA chose CEI of Newington, VA, which boasts a client list that includes NBC, FOX, Discovery Communications, and numerous TV stations. "WETA was using a mixed SD/analog production system," said Joe Strobel, CEI's associate director of engineering. "Our task was to bring them into the HD world."
"We hired CEI early on to help us with the work," added Lane. "They helped us with planning and budgeting for the HD transition, and installing the equipment as well."
Make Room For Digital
In a perfect world, WETA and CEI would have been able to perform this HD upgrade from scratch, unhurried and unhindered by the day-to-day pressures of daily television production. In the real world, this wasn't the case. The NewsHour still had a daily live production, and WETA had other productions that had to be maintained while the upgrade was underway.
"So we kept the NewsHour's existing control room in use, and carved out space for the HD video control room and a separate audio control room from an old editing suite and a conference room," Lane said. "While the new HD world was being created for the show, the existing control room was kept in production without any interruption."
WETA had already installed a Thomson Grass Valley Trinix 256 SD/HD router during its initial upgrade, but it had to be expanded to accommodate the additional HD control room. "Before the project it was populated at 160x160," Lane said. "During the project, we expanded it to 224x224, and the frame can be fully expanded to 256 if needed."
A traditional CRT monitor wall for the new control room was replaced by three Barco 70-inch projection cubes. It was also equipped with a Sony MVS8000A switcher, six-channel EVS video server (two channels for video ingest, four for playback), two Sony XDCAM HD studio decks, expanded Thomson Grass Valley HD routers, and a Harris Inscriber G-Series CG. "The features of the Inscriber, combined with its cost effectiveness, convinced us to make a significant upgrade to our graphics capabilities," noted Lane.
WETA's new audio control room was built around an SSL C100 5.1 surround sound console, which proved to be a timesaver for training because the staff was already familiar with SSL from the old control room. In the NewsHour studio, six Sony HDC1000LW multi-format HD cameras equipped with Fujinon HA27X6.5ESM HD lenses were installed prior to the Dec. 17 switch to HD. These were used in SD mode until the switch, so operators were already familiar with the cameras.
Three of the NewsHour's Avid edit suites were upgraded to HD. "They have eight Avid suites in all," said CEI's Strobel. "In the short term, they'll be producing in both SD and HD, since much of their third-party news video is still in SD." To handle the extra storage demands of HD footage, WETA expanded its Avid Unity system. And for ENG, NewsHour ordered four Sony XDCAM HD camcorders for an all-HD production workflow.
Ready For Action
Once the new HD equipment was in place and configured, WETA and CEI started preparing for the switch. Wherever possible, the station moved to HD equipment as soon as it could. Elements such as the expanded router and EVS video server were brought on line before Thanksgiving weekend, for example, while the uncompressed fiber links between WETA and PBS were checked out in early December.
Once the NewsHour finished its final SD broadcast on Friday, Dec. 14, the last elements of the transition were executed. While WETA and CEI engineers tweaked the new production chain, NewsHour staff and operators began using the new technology in earnest.
According to Lane, most of the staff came in on Sunday, Dec. 16, for a technical rehearsal to iron out the bugs. "On Monday morning, the production staff was able to walk down the hall to their new control room and produce that day's show."
For Lane, the first HD show was almost anti-climatic, because everything worked as planned. "It was pretty much flawless," he told Government Video. "It was one of the smoothest transitions I've been involved with. All those weeks of planning and hard work really paid off!"
As for the future? Although the NewsHour is firmly in the HD world, there's still more work to be done. "We're still having to upconvert a lot of material from SD," said Lane. "We're also taking our time in deploying the XDCAMs in the field. We're taking a 'baby steps' approach: We don't want to overwhelm our people during such a fundamental transition."
MORE INFO
Avid Technology avid.com
Barco barco.com
CEI commeng.com
EVS evs.tv
Fujinon fujinon.com
Harris broadcast.harris.com/inscriber
Sony sony.com/government
SSL solid-state-logic.com
Thomson Grass Valley thomsongrassvalley.com
WETA weta.org
Delays, Delays
Ironically, the execution of WETA's HD upgrade plan was actually slowed down by the receipt of a $1 million government grant, which required them to put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) in exchange for receiving the money. The grant was awarded to WETA by the U.S. Department of Commerce under the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program. On the positive side, the RFP's extensive planning and review process helped WETA and CEI develop a very detailed and thorough roadmap for the project. "We ended up with a good, solid plan," said WETA's Chris Lane.
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