RTNDA: Going HD and keeping costs reasonable

Steve Safran October 25th, 2006

Step one in a good HD video demonstration: have an excellent HD projector and speaker system. Done. With that in place, we got an eyeful (and earful) from three presenters with different goals and challenges. Will Wright, GM of VOOM TV showed an excellent compliation of national and international news from HD News, focusing on video from the Middle East. Watching a reporter in HD run for his life from an incoming rocket attack definitely lends a new level of understanding. “Our goal is to give viewers a vicarious experience,” said Wright,” “To put them there and to experience what our viewers are experience.” Dave Sirak of WFTV in Orlando showed off the work of his place - the first in Florida to go HD. Dave pulled off a small miracle: he turned his station HD in nine months and within two percent of budget. Leesa Moore Cregge of WRAL in Raleigh’s reel shined with a cool weather demo - a product called “HD Vipr.” And if you want to hear compelling audio - WRAL’s NASCAR clip puts you on the track. Plenty of good information follows in the live blog below…

(Notes from Chip Mahaney/KDFW chip@smartbusy.tv)

The first session of the RTNDA@NAB day is all about HD and local stations getting ready to produce content in HD. What you need to know about workflow, management structures, vendors, training, timeline, finance/budget issues, what kind of people you want in your organizations. With a focus on dispelling myths, and unveiling those “a-ha” moments” – things you know now that you wished you knew then.

Dave Sirak of WFTV/Orlando used the convention-room facility we were gathered in at this hour to speak of an initial concern, finding HD-compatible projector playback equipment. Standards are different, and not everything in the digital world is compatible. Dave calls his station a “middle-of-the-road” station. They’ve got decades of investments in standard-definition programming and equipment, and they’re in the middle of a 2-year-process to convert fully to HD. They are now producing their newscasts in HD. Even before they started doing this, they equipped photographers with 16:9 cameras ($5,000 apiece – not too expensive) to allow them the chance to practice and to learn the new skills. After they equipped the cameras, they bought a new switcher. They’ll next be converting tower cams and the helicopter to HD. Those are expensive conversions.

Will Wright from VOOM/HDNews says his team’s goal is to “put you there,” with their reporters and photographers. His biggest challenge in supporting a national/worldwide news-gathering organization is bandwidth. One thing they do to simplify the news-gathering process is to have each field carry its own satellite encoder. This allows them to find a digital satellite truck, order enough bandwidth. That allows us to go live from a lot of places, like the Israel-Lebanon border.

Leesa Moore Craigie: As much as WRAL is branded “coverage you can count on”, HD has really become a brand for them. The viewers don’t know 1080i or all the technology, but they do know good pictures and good story-telling, and that’s what’s most important.

The Transition to HD

Dave: We had a good start in Orlando. The cable system already had a lot of good HD programming out there. They didn’t want to scare off all your existing viewers in the transition.

I got to know my engineers very well in this project. In fact, a project like this brings the whole station together. You have a deadline and you have to do it together. We flew to several stations, took some of their HD tape, brought it back to Orlando to show off to his staff. For instance, KUSA in Denver had a really good graphic look and they integrated it well. Going from 4:3 to 16:9 – they had a really good integration of the two. WFTV decided to take the 4:3 video and put “blue” on the sides. We thought it was distracting to see a color change when going between 16:9 and 4:3. We wanted to make it invisible.

We did a slow migration to get the control room going. We weren’t HD with our viewers yet, but we were HD in house. We added a CG machine and studio cameras. We launched at 5am, and by noon we realized “this wasn’t that hard”. The hardest thing is not going on 16:9, but mixing the two (HD/SD) on the air. We did this in about a year and a half, but really focused the efforts in a nine-month window.

To convince corporate that this was the right time for our station to do this, we told them we didn’t have to buy new cameras, just some modifications. We didn’t have to switch our Avid system, because it was ready for the switch. The big chunks were in buying the studio cameras and switcher.

There’s a lot of hidden costs in converters and down converters, and integrating the SD components during the transition. We did it within 2% of our initial budget. There were things we looked at and like, but we couldn’t do in Year 1.

Nine months was a good window for them to migrate. It was better for us to integrate this gear over a period of time, rather than doing a hard cut.

Competitively, we did this project in secret. The other stations, we learned, don’t have a plan to go HD for a couple of years. But we didn’t want to get beat. We’re first in Orlando and first in Florida.

We have a more sophisticated look. We’re now in that middle stage, where we’re shooting standard-def in the field, but finding opportunities to shoot high-def for certain stories.

We haven’t experienced ratings growth yet, but with HD-set ownership the growing segment of TV purchases, we expect we’ll be well-positioned for the future.

Leesa: At WRAL, we went into the project knowing we’d have everything new, new studio, new control room, new camera. Our switcher had serial number 000001, so we worked through a lot of the bugs with this gear. We saw it at NAB, then installed it in our control room six months later. We knew we’d be waiting for the technology to catch up to us, but we still had to do news every day.

We did it pretty seamlessly for our viewers. We did a lot of market penetration with our branding, and a lot of viewer education. We send our engineers into people’s homes to troubleshoot for them, so they could pick up our signal.

How do we show this is worth the investment?

Will: In July 2003, Rainbow Media put together budgets for each of the channels. We were going to work with vendors who had a stake in high-definition, who wanted this to be the future of their company, who would do it for less cost. We decided technically, we would automate as many systems as possible, save on headcount and operations. We managed the people side by looking at automation. We went to AccuWeather, asked them to create an automated weather system, automated set of weather graphics, triggered by local weather conditions. Our weathercaster is a forecaster in Pennsylvania, using this automated system.

Our workflow is controlled by the producer. Clarity Graphics and Vertigo, AP GraphicsBank. Producer drags these graphics in. Director sets up for graphics to be automatically displayed in the Calypso switcher. It takes a producer, director, anchor, stage manager, switcher, master control – six people. Automation through Leitch, Harris, Accuweather.

Our 6 bureaus are 2 person. Photographer and reporter. We also have 10 mini-bureaus, equipped with cameras. We can FTP video, and we also use FedEx for news that can wait a day.

Vendor Relationships

Leesa: Our her vendors have been very responsive. It’s been a collaborative effort. We have been waiting for technology to catch up to us. We just implemented non-linear HD editing. We stayed tape-to-tape for much longer than we wanted to. We went online with that in March, and part of that changeover was to service our newschannel, cut and paste into different shows. It’s been a challenge to move that amount of video around our servers. BitCentral’s CEO was in our newsroom for two solid weeks to help us get this going.

Dave says a lot of vendors are motivated to get their products on the air. We’ve done a few beta programs where we haven’t paid for the products until they’re installed and released. An advantage of being a beta site is getting their ear for your suggestions and changes. Make sure you budget training time, put training in your contract, and don’t let your contractor physically leave until you’re satisfied.

Leesa says make sure to put in your contract to ensure training is not complete, until you say it’s complete. She’s budgeted for more remedial training for this fall.

Will says his greatest nightmare is that his system is so automated, that you don’t know all the single-points-of-failure until something fails. It’s very common to have a server tie all your video together, sounds very simple, but because of the sheer amount of data moving around, it’s difficult. You have to innovate once you’ve innovated. The frustration level will set in quickly. You have to move quickly to keep people from being demoralized by what COULD go wrong.

Changing Workflow and Management

Dave: What we’re finding is you’re bringing in a new producer, and their skills are not transferable. And the trainers are gone. You’ve invented an entirely new workflow that few other stations understand.

Leesa: The storytelling doesn’t change. The photographers say it doesn’t change anything except it’s a bigger canvas.

Will: Take a look at your maintenance contracts. They’ll be different for HD. Replacement parts are much more expensive in the new HD world. Make sure your new contracts are vetted closely by your engineers. Make sure you manage the post-warranty risk, purchasing maintenance contracts, or knowing how much you’ll have to pay if you’re not covered.

Our Newest HD friends

Will: We’ve found a company Diversified Communications Inc, the mad scientists of HD, in Washington DC. Sony approached us with the HD cam, and they won the contract with News12.

Considering how long television has been organized as a medium, and as a business, it’s still exciting there are a lot of firsts in this business, and there are still plenty out there.

Dave: When you’re working on a project, it’s not like you can call CNN or another station to get video. We had to arrange to send an HD cam to a freelance photographer for an out-of-town to get HD video for a story. We traded video with HDNet. Pathfire is working to deliver HD news to its member stations. CNN is offering 16:9 live shots in standard-definition. Seems like about two stations a month are switching to HD now. Anyone that’s doing HD, you collect their cards and you call them.

Leesa: One of our newest friends is Newcom. They helped us produce a live sailing event. We tested it the day before the live broadcast – that’s how close it was for us.

The A-ha’s

Will: There’s always the debate about makeup – whether to apply with a trowel or apply it lightly. In my shop, we don’t have makeup people, per se. But each anchor has come up with their own system – not much different from SD. You have to have an awesome lighting director, with enough voltage coming into that studio to make the lights look good. A well-placed shadow makes their nose longer and their ears pointy.

Dave: Managing the anxiety of your anchors when going to HD is a biggie. “What’s this going to look like? When can I see it?” We did a side-by-side of new cameras, plus existing cameras, to let the anchors see what the possibilities were. Cameras are very smart now, and they can remember settings for individual anchors or shots.

Dave: Conversion of Sprint/Nextel. When you’re dealing with the Sprint/Nextel conversion, make sure you get the equipment that’s upgradable to HD.

Keep in mind that the only deadline is simply to go digital. You don’t have to start shooting 16:9, though you might find some vendors who’ll tell you that.

Leesa: Remember, it’s still television.

Question: Scalability

Dave: Build your backbone. Router, then switcher, then studio cameras. You can buy an HD camera and still broadcast in standard-definition. In fact, you’ll have a hard time buying standard-definition gear these days.

At NASA, the video world has transferred to the IT world. It’s all bandwidth these days – that’s important.

Question: Core Skills and Training

Dave: Core skills don’t change. We’re using equipment that’s still in beta, so we have to teach people new things they’ve never seen before… that no one’s ever seen before.

Leesa: We’re constantly revisiting deadlines in-house. We’re having to move things up for ingest, to make sure we get things on the air.

Will: We started looking at our graphics designers, for our front-line defense. They must know AfterEffects.

Question: Dealing with consumer video

Will: Rather than try to upconvert consumer video to HD, we actually push it back. Squeeze it into a box, makes the scanlines tighter, makes the picture look better. We’ll use this for breaking news until we can get our own HD cams there. The 2004 tsunami was a good example of this. We had to rely on lots of our outside video until we could get our own crews there.
The network news services are having the hardest time getting the HD video to you.

What kind of camera for $5,000?

Dave: HDV is the format. Highly-compressed video put on DV tape. Great for sending crews out, because they can buy supplies (tapes) at places like Circuit City.

Sony 1ZU, Canon, Panasonic, JVC. Competitively priced $3500-5000 range.

What we also do in-house, is when we record an SD from out-of-market, is we treat it up front. That way when the producers see it in their system, it’s already ready to air.