WTOC, Savannah, Georgia, news, weather and sports | Gray Talks TV Tech at Local ACM Chapter

Gray Talks TV Tech at Local ACM Chapter

SAVANNAH, GA--While many in our area had the day off to observe Veterans Day (check out our image gallery from the Savannah parade), it was business as usual on the campus of Armstrong Atlantic State University.

I was pleased to spend some time there this afternoon as guest speaker for the AASU chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery monthly meeting.

The group works to promote knowledge of and interest in the different fields of information technology. They invite speakers from the professional world making use of technology in the kinds of jobs they may hold themselves one day.

Part-time instructor and club advisor Chris McCarthy told us, "They want to pursue careers in the field of computer science and IT. So the whole goal is to get them ready for that. In addition to the way the classroom gets them ready for that."

My talk today was about the kinds of IT we use in the local news business to bring you our live newscasts each day. For more on that, here's a piece I wrote this past summer for our monthly print publication, The Southeast News Leader:

21st-Century TV Tech: WTOC Goes Tapeless
by Charles Gray

Most of us are familiar with the television news cliche "film at eleven." Well, it's been a long time since TV news was shot on film, and "tape at eleven" just never had the same ring. How about "MPEG-2 file at eleven"? Yuck.

It may not sound great, but the benefits of today's film- and tape-free television production are having a huge impact on our daily workflow at WTOC, and we hope our viewers are benefiting as well. Here's a look behind the scenes at how we shoot, edit, and air video in a totally digital environment. 

The Back Story
You've probably seen a WTOC crew shooting a news story around the Coastal Empire or Low Country. As you might have guessed, we shoot more video than we have time to air during our regular newscasts. So we may be on a story for hours and shoot all kinds of footage. When the crew gets back to the station, we have to edit that down to a minute or two for the on-air story.

In the old days, when rugged TV pioneers shot on film, this was a much slower process. Firstly, film had to be developed in a lab. Then different parts of the story were literally cut and pasted together. The finished product was threaded into a projector and aired, hopefully, by eleven.

Then came video tape. Aside from the fact that you don't need to take tape to the lab, there were other tremendous advantages that can be appreciated by anyone who's ever made a music mix on a cassette.

First, you can play video on one tape deck and record it on another. This means no more cutting and pasting--you simply cue the first deck to the shot you want and record on the second deck. Repeat for the second shot and so on, just like editing your mix tape with the songs you want in the order you want.

Secondly, video tape can be reused. While we kept the edited stories in an archive, the day-to-day work tapes of our photographers could be used over and over again, unlike film which can only be exposed once.

Video tape formats improved over the years and eventually went digital. The last tape format used at WTOC was DVC Pro, kind of a big cousin to the Mini-DV format popular in home video cameras. The quality was good and the editing was easier than ever, but it remained a deck-to-deck, mechanical process.

Too Many Moving Parts
WTOC began its journey to becoming a tapeless newsroom a few years ago. Even while shooting on tape, many of our editors began working on computers, which dramatically reduces the time it takes to edit a story. Here's why.

Going back to our mix tape analogy, imagine you'd finished putting your tape together and realized it would be much better if there were just one more song in the play list. The problem: the spot where it belongs is in the middle. You're looking at recording over part of your tape, then creating the latter half all over again from scratch.

Thank goodness for CD burners and MP3 players.

It's a similar story with editing for TV. Editing mechanically, you're setting yourself for a lot of work if you want to add something to the middle of the story. However, on the computer, you can add the additional video without writing over anything. The computer can split the story in two, drop in the extra video, then put everything neatly back together in a few seconds.

But we were still shooting on tape. We had to play the video on a tape deck connected to a computer in order to record it in digital format (this is called encoding). The encoded video is a computer file called an MPEG-2, a close relative of the ubiquitous MP3 audio files anyone who listens to music on an iPod is familiar with.

MPEG-2 is easy to work with much more quickly than tape, but you still had to sit there while your tape played into the computer before you could work with the video.

This past summer came the big change. No more video tape.

Fewer Moving Parts
The cameras may look similar, but when you see a WTOC News crew out on a story these days, they're using some the most up-to-date video equipment there is. We invested in the state-of-the-art P2 camera from Panasonic. The medium is a thin memory card that can hold over 30 minutes of high-quality video. We can even shoot in high definition.

Veterans of the video tape age will tell you the first advantage is speed. If you wanted to encode 30 minutes of video into a computer from tape, it would take you 30 minutes. You have to play through, in real time, any video you want to encode.

Now, the video's already encoded and just needs to be transferred from the camera's video card to the computer. That 30 minutes of video can be copied over in about ten minutes.

Another big advance: network editing. When we put the video into our system, it goes onto a shared computer on a super-fast network. That means it can be accessed from any of our editing computers. You can start working on a story at one computer, and come back later to finish it from another.

It's also incredibly useful for sharing video. Suppose we're doing two stories about, say, a presidential visit. Both editors can work with the video of the president's speech at the same time. Before, they'd have to share the tape, or go through the time-consuming process of copying it.

The reporter's voice is also recorded digitally in a sound booth with a microphone connected to a computer, so the editor has all the pieces he needs on the network.

So we've got our video and audio, and we can quickly edit it together (or "cut" it, in newsroom parlance) on the computer. Even adding graphics or special transitions between shots can be done swiftly, whereas in the film days, a simple dissolve effect between two pieces of film required a trip to the photo processing lab.

The finished product is a high-quality MPEG-2 file with two audio tracks (one for people's voices, the other for natural environmental sound, or "nat" sound). It's played from a computer to our transmitter with the click of a mouse.

Putting It All Together
Of course, it's more than just the one or two stories. We air six hours of live, local programming each weekday, and it all features a lot of recorded material. All those stories are kept on our high-speed computer network, where the producers who put our shows together can access them from their desks. The system allows them to preview the video, read the scripts, and make decisions about when they want to air which stories.

Since we're in the live news business, things don't always go as planned earlier in the day. If there's breaking news close to air time, our planned top story may get delayed a few minutes while we bring you a live report from the field. Producers can quickly reorder video in their play lists (called rundowns) to show the breaking news first, then move on to the other story.

If we decide to rebroadcast the same story in a later show, the same MPEG-2 file can quickly be attached to the new rundown, again from the producer's desktop computer.

Even what we call file video--video we shot in the past but need to reuse for, say, an update to the story--can be easily found on the network. Just like you might use Google to search for a web page, our producers can type in keywords to search our ever-growing archive and call up that old video. It can be re-aired as is, or edited together with new video to create an all-new story.

Teamwork, Trust, and Technology
You've heard us talk about our technology on air...our Doppler Max 11 radar, wtoc.com, all the cutting-edge ways we work to bring you the latest news, sports and weather information you demand.

Implementing this new shooting and editing system was not easy, requiring countless hours of rewiring, training, and troubleshooting. It's been a challenge, but it's just part of our mission to remain the Southeast News Leader and constantly strive to bring you the best coverage we can.

That's a long way to come for a station which signed on under very different circumstances in 1954. And we hope you'll stay with us as we continue to look to the future.

Reported by: Charles Gray, cgray@wtoc.com