Government Television Station’s Solution to Affording Four New High Quality Edit Systems on a Tight Budget
By Tor Jøhånsen, Broadcast Manager - GTV6, Glendale, California
For the last ten years, I’ve been with GTV6, Glendale, the award-winning government access cable channel for the City of Glendale, California. Earlier this year, I got the go-ahead to update and standardize all of our edit bays. The problem was, our budget was drastically cut shortly after. However, with some assistance from TV PRO GEAR here in Glendale, and a little creativity, we got four new, turnkey broadcast edit suites that were paid for exclusively by selling our old, over-priced and antiquated equipment.
First, we started with the new Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Extreme cards because we believe they are the “Swiss Army knife” of I/O cards. From standard DV all the way up to uncompressed 4:2:2 10 bit 1080p, we knew all our bases would be covered. We’d already been using the (standard definition) DeckLink Extreme cards as back plates for our multi-cam green screen insert stage work. I found those cards to be the most affordable method for uncompressed SDI output, which our Ultimatte 9 hardware required, and I was extremely pleased with their quality (and price), so it was an easy decision. Similar capture cards are just overpriced without offering anything else for us. Additionally, I really like that Blackmagic Design products are equally friendly with Macs and PCs because we have, and make use of, both platforms in our growing facility. We use the DeckLink HD Extreme card for monitoring all our projects during editing, compositing and color correction. We standardize on SDI video married with balanced analog audio, so having analog audio I/O on the card was really important. It’s also a huge bonus to be able to convert from HD down to SD in the card itself, all in real time. Another important feature that we require is that the Blackmagic card comes with Genlock/Tri-Sync reference input. Our Ultimatte hardware needs this, as well as our pro VTRs.
We purchased four new edit suites consisting of Mac Pros, each with 2.6 GHz Quad processors and 4 GB ram each. For storage, we use the internal SATA 3Gb/s drives and an external 600 GB LaCie Firewire 2d Hard Drive Extreme with Triple Interface (we use the FW800 interface) These are more than fast enough and big enough for our present needs and are expandable by daisy-chaining, as necessary. They also make it very easy for us to take projects with us from one bay to another, or to work from home during the weekend. As our new fiscal year begins, and our budget gets refreshed, we plan to make use of all the drive bays in the new Mac Pros (thank you Steve) with a screaming internal RAID with over 2 TB’s of video storage.
Our primary applications are the Apple Studio suite of tools, Adobe PhotoShop CS2, Illustrator CS2, and After Effects Pro 7. We’re able to view our compositions from After Effects and Photoshop as we’re putting them together, using the DeckLink HD Extreme card to display WYSIWYG NTSC or HD video. I love that feature with Blackmagic’s DeckLink HD Extreme card, because it shows you exactly what it’s going to look like. The Cinema Displays are great, but not necessarily a realistic viewing of your critical motion graphics work. We have QuickTime files that we share around the facility via Gigabit Ethernet. We can play a QuickTime file and automatically send it to a video display through a DeckLink card rather than look at it on the computer.
In addition to the four new edit suites, we already had three Power Mac G5s with dual 2.5 GHz processors in the station that were being used, so now we have a total of seven systems, all using DeckLink cards. Our studio shoots are captured live to hard drive. For our field shoots, which includes PSAs, promos, documentaries, training videos (for police and fire), surveillance for police investigations, aerial photography for the city, and more, we use Panasonic SDX900 2/3” camcorders and roll DVCPRO50 tape.
We recently went live with our new edit systems. The hardware/software exchange took place on a Friday and by Monday we were up and running with all the new Macs, powered by Blackmagic. The four new Final Cut bays were installed in our recently constructed, full-time editing suites which are all soundproofed, climate controlled, with color balanced, dimmable lighting, on workstation consoles with lots of rack space, etc… The existing G5 workstations were spread around amongst our staff. All my editors are thankful for the new NLE systems. Blackmagic video capture cards provide our facility with so many options -- from analog to digital, SD to HD … all that for under a grand a pop, you just can’t beat it.
