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Limited Funds, Innovative Options

Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Sidebars
"The Guerrilla Model"

Small-Market ENG Strategies

Ed Agre chuckles at the question: Will his station, KXGN-TV in Glendive, Mont., be upgrading its electronic newsgathering infrastructure any time soon?

“We are the smallest market in the entire country,” says Agre, news director at KXGN and a 50-year broadcast veteran. “Dead last. I'm a one-man news crew here, and I'm still using a 10-year-old Panasonic camcorder. There is lots of new technology out there, but I don't see us having much of a budget to upgrade any time soon.”

While that may be true in Glendive, many small-market stations around the country are implementing or investigating various models designed to permit them to evolve their newsgathering equipment from analog or first-generation digital to DV. Most stations have limited funds, and are, therefore, intrigued about the notion of combining DV or mini-DV acquisition technology with software-based field editing tools to improve mobility in the field.

At such stations, “one-man bands” routinely do the bulk of the newsgathering. Therefore, “any combination of tools that make it easier for one person to shoot news, record audio, report, and edit their own pieces naturally interests us,” says Lee Anderson, news director at KTVZ in Bend, Ore. (market 201 in the nation).

Anderson and officials at other small-market stations around the country recently discussed their ENG technology upgrade strategies and wish lists with VideoSystems.

Bend, Oregon

According to Anderson, KTVZ recently implemented a major overhaul of its ENG infrastructure with guidance from equipment dealer Infinite Solutions of Beaverton, Ore.

KTVZ in Bend, Ore. recently overhauled its ENG infrastructure with purchases of JVC GY-DV500 cameras (shown above with reporter/producer Kelsey Hertig) in combination with Avid DV Express editing stations (bottom).

“The change has made our newsgathering far more efficient,” says Anderson. “We have 11 full-time employees for news, one microwave truck, and typically, our ENG crews are one-man affairs. We were looking to upgrade from using analog S-VHS Panasonic cameras and half-inch edit decks to tools that would make us more mobile and efficient. In February, we made a major purchase to make this happen.”

That major purchase for a station KTVZ's size, however, still came in under $70,000, according to Scott Wehba, president of Infinite Solutions, who sold KTVZ executives on the equipment overhaul plan.

“Their goals were to upgrade acquisition from analog to digital, add multiple non-linear editing stations to replace analog editors, and to come up with some kind of work-group network media sharing situation at a low cost,” Wehba explains.

To accomplish those goals, KTVZ purchased three JVC GY-DV500 Professional DV cameras for field acquisition, in combination with four Avid DV Express editing stations. Those edit stations have been networked together through a gigabit Ethernet network, permitting KTVZ to play stories direct-to-air from Avid workstations.

“We aren't editing in the field yet, but with this kind of technology, we'll get there eventually,” adds Anderson. “Meantime, DV cameras have lightened the load for our reporters, and the Avids have allowed them to edit their own material. That has improved the quality of our work because the creative people are now putting the pieces together directly. In a place where everyone wears multiple hats, this was the best approach.”

Wehba concedes that some people still question whether the mini-DV tape format is robust enough for daily newsgathering, but he insists the answer is “yes.”

“The misconception is that mini-DV tapes are weak and not up to the wear and tear of daily news gathering, and that is true of lower-grade tapes,” says Wehba. “But Sony, Panasonic, and JVC are all offering more robust tapes now — professional grade DV tapes — that have made that a non-issue.”

Casper and Cheyenne, Wyoming

For financial reasons, many small stations find themselves upgrading slowly and modestly, waiting until their current technology has completely worn out. But they also face cultural changes in upgrading — changes in their traditional newsgathering approach.

In Wyoming, for instance, sister stations KTWO, Casper (market 200), and KKTU, Cheyenne (market 197), cover the entire state with a tiny, combined staff. According to news director Susan Burk, the two stations were upgraded a few years ago to DVCPRO cameras and edit bays, but they have never had a satellite truck. That limitation on their ability to report instantly from outlying areas has led to a tradition of using edited feature reports on tape from stringers — features that, due to logistical issues, often take several days to put together.

The KTWO news department routinely waits for raw tapes to be mailed in, or driven in, from news locations hours away. Burk says KTWO is now investigating purchasing a satellite truck sometime in the next year, budget permitting, but adds that the station has been eager to find other ways to bring in material from remote areas more efficiently. Shortly before press-time, she said the station had finally conducted its first successful experiment with electronic, remote newsgathering.

“We have a reporter named Penny Preston in the northwest quadrant of the state, in the Jackson/Cody area, far from where we are located,” says Burk. “She has recently been shooting material using her own mini-DV cameras [Panasonic consumer units, PV-DV900 and PV-DV221 palmcorders], and mailing raw tapes to us with notes, and then we would have to edit it ourselves before putting it on the air. But working with the engineering staff at our station group [Equity Broadcasting, Little Rock, Ark.], she is now starting to edit her own material on her laptop [using Adobe Premiere 6.0]. We conducted our first test last week, during which she sent the video to a website, where we downloaded it. The test wasn't perfect, the video still looked a little pixilated, but it was acceptable quality, and with some work, we think we can get it better. We'll shortly be airing her reports this way. The problem with those outlying rural areas, of course, is that it's hard to find high-speed transmission lines. But the idea is far more efficient than what we've been doing, so I expect we'll eventually expand the concept and have other reporters doing it sooner or later. I'm definitely putting into our next budget some money to purchase at least one mini-DV camera for this purpose.”

Burk adds that the station also recently aired two other remote reports that were shot on mini-DV tape and edited later in the newsroom.

“One report was from a producer on staff who went to the Red Desert, which is a very wild area that the government has targeted for oil and gas exploration,” explains Burk. “Environmentalists took him there for a report on their objections, and he had to hike in, with goats carrying supplies, which is pretty common in that area. It wasn't practical to lug along a big camera, so he borrowed a mini-DV camera [Sony's DCR-TRV11] and got great broadcast footage that way. In that case, even if we had a satellite truck, it wouldn't have helped, so those small cameras are definitely useful in remote areas. We did another report recently showing viewers a training exercise by the Mountain Special Response Team here in Wyoming, and our reporter shot that also using one of those cameras [Sony's DCR-VX2000 Handycam].”

Chico, California

At KNVN and KHSL in Chico, Calif. (market 133), a shared service agreement has led to one news operation providing coverage for two separate stations — an NBC affiliate and a CBS affiliate. News director Scott Howard says that when the two stations unified their news departments a couple of years ago in a deal struck between the owners of the two stations — the Catamount Broadcast Group and the Evans Broadcast Group — they experienced their most recent equipment evolution: KNVN was using analog S-VHS and KHSO was 3/4in. analog. Both transitioned to Panasonic's DVCPRO for acquisition and editing.

Reporter/producer Brent Kocal uses a DVCPRO AJ-D215 camera to shoot a water safety story in Chico, Calif.-the kind of rough terrain that small-market stations routinely cover with one-person ENG crews.

“We've been happy with this technology for traditional stuff,” says Howard. “But we are still doing linear editing with the DVCPRO equipment, and we are beginning to see, two years later, the value of moving into the DV world and taking advantage of newer, less expensive tools. We are waiting for our next budget cycle and have not yet made a commitment, but certainly I think prosumer cameras and non-linear editing, even field editing, would be helpful at our level. We just want to get as much mileage as we can out of our existing DVPRO equipment first. After that, moving to DV might make sense. I know that in larger markets, the idea of reporters shooting their own stuff is not well received, but in smaller markets like ours, we've always done things that way. Lighter, more compact cameras would therefore make sense, and so would laptops for field editing.”

The potential of such technology to save money in small markets is very real.

“Take the notion of bureau offices,” Howard says. “With broadband improving, why couldn't we have our bureau reporters just work from their homes with a mini-DV camera, editing software, and so on? They could write it, shoot it, edit it, and send us the report over high-speed lines. All we would need to pay is that person's fee and the capital cost of the equipment. You wouldn't have the overhead of a field office to worry about anymore. Stations like ours have wide, rural areas to cover, and sending out live trucks or having bureaus in all those areas is frequently impossible anyway. So I really like that model and see lots of potential in it for improving the way we collect news in the future.”

Palm Desert, California

KMIR in Palm Desert (market 161 in the nation, serving the Palm Springs/Coachella Valley area) still relies on the analog Beta formats, according to news director John LaPorte. KMIR is part of a larger station group — Milwaukee's Journal Broadcast Group — and so is also part of a larger strategic upgrade plan.

Photojournalist Eddie Luna of KMIR, Palm Desert, uses Betacam technology for the station’s ENG work.

“The station group has plans to take us all digital, but it won't happen for a couple of years because we have to wait our turn as they first convert larger stations in the group,” LaPorte explains. “They recently converted our Las Vegas affiliate [KTNV] to digital, and so we inherited some of their analog Beta cameras and other equipment that was still in good shape. After we use it for a while, we will get upgraded.”

KMIR has been using VOD news servers to take NBC network video feeds for a couple years. The station was also one of the first small-market stations in the nation to begin transmitting an HD signal this past May. The relative health of the station's Beta equipment, combined with the HD transmission project, caused the station to prioritize technology upgrades in other areas ahead of ENG in recent years.

“We've recently installed a sophisticated rack of up-converters [a combination of Miranda, Tandberg, and Evertz technology] to turn our NTSC signal into HD, so that project has been the top project for a while,” says Greg Green, the station's director of operations. “With the timeline of the company's capital plan for converting all its stations to digital being about five years, we are hoping our future ENG upgrades will eventually get us technology that will permit us to head toward a tapeless newsroom someday. But keep in mind, we are a smaller station and we are not doing volume news, so we will always work within certain financial and manpower constraints. But certainly, there is technology out there now that is starting to make sense within those constraints, and we're researching it carefully.”

ENG's Future: What About Tapeless?

How long before local news reporters, using low-cost, micro-sized, digital cameras plugged into cell phones, start routinely filing live, wireless reports from remote locations, eliminating the need for satellite and microwave trucks, or even relatively new satellite phone technology?

For most industry watchers, that evolution is still far from reality; not because such technology isn't viable, but because it isn't cost-effective yet, especially for small market broadcasters.

Sony’s mini-DV unit, the PD-150, is making inroads into newsgathering at various market levels around the country.

“Networks will pioneer that stuff, and local stations will follow, but their needs and budgets are different,” says Chris Bone, a broadcast sales representative at Video Tape Products, Glendale, Calif. “Clients at the local level purchase based on performance and cost. Right now, performance is pretty even on the acquisition side, so they are basing choices mainly on cost. This is why so-called prosumer and consumer tools aimed at videographers and the general public are making their way into local broadcasting. Local news in small markets will always rely on lower-cost tools, and some of the coming big advancements won't reach their price level for a while yet.”

Still, manufacturers are developing various tools aimed at getting news people transitioned to the mobile digital world at a reasonable cost.

“Look at Sony's DSR-DU1 [compact video disk recorder, compatible with many Sony DV-Camcorders],” says Bone. “That's a DV recorder about the size of a camera battery that you can use to turn a camcorder into a disc recorder. I'd think that would be a nice tool for a news photographer. Lots of manufacturers are coming out with such things. The third-party folk are also making audio packages and adapters for these DV cameras so that you can get most professional-level functions out of them.”

Industry people are watching such developments closely. Greg Thies, operations manager for KING TV, Seattle, for instance, is optimistic about the evolution of recordable disc camera technology.

“Right now, we use Beta-SX, and that is a fine application for gathering news at our level,” says Thies. “But one reason we are holding off on exploring DV or mini-DV too deeply is we are waiting to see what happens with field acquisition once we can get away from tape. I like the DVD disc option more than hard-disc based cameras, because I see the cost for storage as being expensive with those cameras. But with DVDs, you have a writeable medium that provides excellent storage, without taking up much physical or network space. Blu-Ray [an in-development recordable disc technology created by a consortium of manufacturers, including Sony, Matsushita, Hitachi, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Thompson, and others] is certainly something we are following, and I think in the next 12 to 18 months, we might see applications for broadcasters.”

Many news veterans, however, wonder about the durability of either hard drives or DVDs in the field.

“Tapes are very durable generally,” says Devin Burress, assistant chief engineer at WPTV, West Palm Beach, Fla. “You can damage a tape and still get most of your data from it. If you crack a DVD or smash a hard drive, you have probably lost everything you shot. That's why news people are still waiting to see how it will all shake down. We need to see more field tests performed with this technology. In the end, cost and which is the more durable media will determine which direction the industry goes.”

In any case, many industry types feel that news broadcasting is the ideal venue for the convergence of high-end and low-end approaches — a sort of circular synergy whereby high-end capabilities are finding their way into low-end cameras, making them attractive to broadcasters at all levels.

“Look at mini-DV,” says Sal Paglia, former engineering manager at Oxygen Media, a New York-based cable network. Although Oxygen does not produce traditional broadcast news, it relies heavily on ENG-style coverage to create a wide range of diverse programming, including several shows that are now shot in the field on DV-cam — Sony's PD-150 — by producers/editors dubbed predators by the network.

“These cameras originally started as consumer cameras,” says Paglia. “Third-party manufacturers then produced accessories, such as wireless mic receiver brackets, light posts, balanced audio inputs with level control, matte boxes, and wide angle converters. As the use shifted back to the broadcaster, manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic started adding more of these features that are found in higher-end camcorders. Sony's PD-150 is a good example. In its primal state, it was once a VX-1000 [consumer camera]. Through evolution, it grew XLR inputs, easy audio level adjustments, a shotgun mic, and timecode abilities. The driver in all this has been cost, followed by ease of use, and acceptance. It's a trend that is not going away.”

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Sidebar

The Guerrilla Model

THE TIME WARNER CABLE GROUP HAS AGGRESSIVELY pursued the so-called “guerrilla news” model in recent years, starting with a regional, 24-hour cable news channel in the early ‘90s — New York's NY1. (That channel was re-launched with a new facility and technology upgrades earlier this year. See the March, 2002 issue of VideoSystems.) The company has expanded the concept into six other markets, most recently in Charlotte, N.C., this past June, and it is expected to continue into at least four more cities by the middle of next year, according to Harlan Neugeboren, Time Warner's senior director of engineering and technology.

Reporter John Agresti heads into the field on the first day on the air for News14 Carolina in Charlotte, N.C., using Sony’s DSR-250 mini-DV camera (top), while editor David Hyman works on a Pinnacle Vortex News Journalist workstation (bottom).

In the Time Warner model, individual video journalists travel the region with DVC-PRO or DV cameras, collecting large volumes of video, editing that material on Pinnacle Systems' Vortex News Journalist workstations, and then playing the pieces back around the clock in news wheel fashion through Pinnacle servers, with live updates inserted as needed.

While NY1 evolved its acquisition technology from Hi8 to Panasonic's DVCPRO, the brand-new News14 Carolina and future launches are starting life with Sony's DSR-250 mini-DV cameras as their main acquisition tool.

“The older stations will start adding mini-DV to the mix, as well, so they'll end up using an integrated mix of DV-Cam and DVCPRO over time,” says Neugeboren. “We had been talking to Panasonic and Sony for a while, after using Panasonic's DVCPRO for about five years in New York. We kept saying we needed smaller cameras, since we demand a lot from our journalists. DV-Cam is lighter and more mobile, with all the same functionality of the bigger cameras. Essentially, it's perfect for the kind of newsgathering that we do, so we decided to go with those cameras.”

Still, Neugeboren emphasizes that the ultimate goal of a volume-based, 24-hour news service is sucking edited news reports into digital servers quickly. As a result, the company is closely monitoring developments related to the evolution of hard disc-cams and DVD-cams as “an ultimate solution” beyond DV-Cam.

“From a field acquisition standpoint, we don't care what kind of camera it is as long as we can reliably record the images,” he says. “Our bigger issue is how to transfer the material to our centralized server. Therefore, recordable disc cameras interest us, as do cameras with hard drives. The transfer speed from the hard drive or DVD is the whole key for us, so I presume, eventually, hard drives will be the way we would go since file transfers would probably be the quickest method. But we'll have to see how those technologies develop.”

Similarly, Time Warner has installed Pinnacle's Vortex editing technology, and in Charlotte, it has been beta testing the Vortex 200 add-on — a software-based editor that includes full-scale effects and graphics abilities. This ability to transform most PCs in the newsroom, and eventually, field laptops into potential edit stations is “very appealing for our kind of operation,” says Neugeboren.
- MG

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