WCAV-TV, WVAW-LD, WAHU-CD are owned by Gray Television, Inc (GTN). WCAV & WVAW signed on for the first time on August 15, 2004.
The News
The newsroom I inherited had been doing two nightly newscasts for a little over a month at the time of my arrival. They were leaderless, lacking focus and direction, but were hungry to be good.
During my tenure there, we launched early evening news, 10pm news, morning news, weekend news and a noon show for good measure.
Prior to the group's arrival, Charlottesville had just one commercial television station. By bringing the market a CBS, ABC and Fox affiliate, inventory tripled. The community benefitted in so many ways from the breakup of that monopoly. Whether it was competitive ad rates or having another voice for news in the community, Charlottesville was becoming a media hub of sorts.
In a market where on-air people typically come and go, Charlottesville still sees a lot of tenured anchors and reporters there, because the quality of life is unbeatable.
In a town where there are so many non-profits, it's where I learned the true importance of giving back to my community.
During my tenure there, we launched early evening news, 10pm news, morning news, weekend news and a noon show for good measure.
Prior to the group's arrival, Charlottesville had just one commercial television station. By bringing the market a CBS, ABC and Fox affiliate, inventory tripled. The community benefitted in so many ways from the breakup of that monopoly. Whether it was competitive ad rates or having another voice for news in the community, Charlottesville was becoming a media hub of sorts.
In a market where on-air people typically come and go, Charlottesville still sees a lot of tenured anchors and reporters there, because the quality of life is unbeatable.
In a town where there are so many non-profits, it's where I learned the true importance of giving back to my community.
Technically
We needed an effective and efficient way to present the same raw material in four different brands.
We opted for a simulcast in the mornings for launch, and worked out so well, we kept it. This way any added resources go to the collective whole. That strategy was not prudent for us at the 11pm time slot because of the very different audiences that were being delivered to us by CBS and ABC. Ultimately, the economics of broadcasting dictated an 11pm simulcast on the CBS & ABC affiliates. While delivering one product two both stations, decreased total headcount, the consequence was a newscast that was less tailored to a specific lead-in.
From a graphics standpoint, we purchased Inca Inscribers to run our CG and graphic animations. The system wasn’t prepared to accommodate so many different graphics looks. As these machines reached their peak memory capacity, they would begin to stutter on air. We corrected that by purchasing larger hard drives. In all, each machine held the two to three different graphics packages (we producer a 30 minute sports show that has yet another look).
To handle video, we purchased Leitch Nexio workstations for editing. Our original field acquisition source were Firestores (hard drive devices). The problem was every time you started and stopped a record, a new file was created. So a reporter shooting a package, could have come back with up to thirty files, each of which had to be imported independently.
So in the summer of 2006, we went back to tape acquisition which ended up being a lot more effective for us.
We were specked out for a Sundance system that would eventually be able to handle advancing graphics and operating our robotic cameras. The problem at the time, our robotic cameras are only X-Y axis, and at that time, addition an additional four studio cameras to accommodate every potential scenario, wasn't in the budget.
Secondly, for graphic control, the Sundance system required a MOS tag from ENPS (it also requires a MOS tag for video as well). The problem is the time it takes to create one CG through the Sundance interface was about 4 times as long as just using the basic ENPS command. For efficiency sake, we opted out of using that feature as well. So we were left having Sundance control just our video playback.
The inherent problem with this software is that it did not allow independent control over the playback channels. Each of our two control rooms had two playback channels. The problem is, the channels are linked. So when you roll the next event, you have two seconds to get off of the current event, before it auto-advances.... it has to in order to load the next piece of video. There was no way to manually dump out of the event. Another problem for our faster paced shows was not being able to roll back to back events in a short period of time (3 seconds or less) without the machine locking up.
A huge issue for us was the inability to view video anywhere but in the edit bays. Unlike the old viewing stations that you would find in the newsroom during the days of tape, we were unable to watch video we were dropping in our shows. So a producer in the newsroom has to take on faith that the editor cut the video as requested.
One of two things should have happened here.
1) Those who sold us the editing system, should have stressed the importance of having a low res station in the newsroom.
2) There should be some solution (i.e. Windows media player) so you could click on a MOS tag and see the video associated with that tag.
Finally, the MOS tag system in ENPS slows the process down. In that, in order to add video to a rundown, the user must open up an ActiveX window inside of ENPS and then physically open up the specific script. Then, find the video out of the media base using the ActiveX window, and then it must be dragged to the very bottom of the script. At the time, there was a bug so that if the MOS tag was accidentally put anywhere else in the body of the script, it caused gigantic gaps in the prompter.
From a producer standpoint, unless you are fortunate to be working at a computer with two monitors, there is no real efficient way to navigate through ENPS when dealing with multiple shows and multiple rundowns.
To Summarize... know your workflow. Equipment buys are not just for the chief engineer, but the news director needs to come in with a clear understanding of his/her station’s work flow. Know where you are today, but where you plan on going five years from now. When we integrated our system, we were doing 90 minutes of news a day. When I left in November 2008, we were producing 6 hours of original content on weekdays.
We opted for a simulcast in the mornings for launch, and worked out so well, we kept it. This way any added resources go to the collective whole. That strategy was not prudent for us at the 11pm time slot because of the very different audiences that were being delivered to us by CBS and ABC. Ultimately, the economics of broadcasting dictated an 11pm simulcast on the CBS & ABC affiliates. While delivering one product two both stations, decreased total headcount, the consequence was a newscast that was less tailored to a specific lead-in.
From a graphics standpoint, we purchased Inca Inscribers to run our CG and graphic animations. The system wasn’t prepared to accommodate so many different graphics looks. As these machines reached their peak memory capacity, they would begin to stutter on air. We corrected that by purchasing larger hard drives. In all, each machine held the two to three different graphics packages (we producer a 30 minute sports show that has yet another look).
To handle video, we purchased Leitch Nexio workstations for editing. Our original field acquisition source were Firestores (hard drive devices). The problem was every time you started and stopped a record, a new file was created. So a reporter shooting a package, could have come back with up to thirty files, each of which had to be imported independently.
So in the summer of 2006, we went back to tape acquisition which ended up being a lot more effective for us.
We were specked out for a Sundance system that would eventually be able to handle advancing graphics and operating our robotic cameras. The problem at the time, our robotic cameras are only X-Y axis, and at that time, addition an additional four studio cameras to accommodate every potential scenario, wasn't in the budget.
Secondly, for graphic control, the Sundance system required a MOS tag from ENPS (it also requires a MOS tag for video as well). The problem is the time it takes to create one CG through the Sundance interface was about 4 times as long as just using the basic ENPS command. For efficiency sake, we opted out of using that feature as well. So we were left having Sundance control just our video playback.
The inherent problem with this software is that it did not allow independent control over the playback channels. Each of our two control rooms had two playback channels. The problem is, the channels are linked. So when you roll the next event, you have two seconds to get off of the current event, before it auto-advances.... it has to in order to load the next piece of video. There was no way to manually dump out of the event. Another problem for our faster paced shows was not being able to roll back to back events in a short period of time (3 seconds or less) without the machine locking up.
A huge issue for us was the inability to view video anywhere but in the edit bays. Unlike the old viewing stations that you would find in the newsroom during the days of tape, we were unable to watch video we were dropping in our shows. So a producer in the newsroom has to take on faith that the editor cut the video as requested.
One of two things should have happened here.
1) Those who sold us the editing system, should have stressed the importance of having a low res station in the newsroom.
2) There should be some solution (i.e. Windows media player) so you could click on a MOS tag and see the video associated with that tag.
Finally, the MOS tag system in ENPS slows the process down. In that, in order to add video to a rundown, the user must open up an ActiveX window inside of ENPS and then physically open up the specific script. Then, find the video out of the media base using the ActiveX window, and then it must be dragged to the very bottom of the script. At the time, there was a bug so that if the MOS tag was accidentally put anywhere else in the body of the script, it caused gigantic gaps in the prompter.
From a producer standpoint, unless you are fortunate to be working at a computer with two monitors, there is no real efficient way to navigate through ENPS when dealing with multiple shows and multiple rundowns.
To Summarize... know your workflow. Equipment buys are not just for the chief engineer, but the news director needs to come in with a clear understanding of his/her station’s work flow. Know where you are today, but where you plan on going five years from now. When we integrated our system, we were doing 90 minutes of news a day. When I left in November 2008, we were producing 6 hours of original content on weekdays.
