A View to the Future

20Mar08

KNBC is planning to join the High Definition World this summer… hopefully in time to see the Summer Olympics in full glory.

This week –as a KNBC news writer –I got a chance to see the future.  It is a brand new control room full of all the digital tricks that let fewer people do more things.

Now, this is the third time I have witnessed a completely changed control room at Channel 4.  I have not been here long enough to have witnessed the exciting days of news film, but when I first came here the remnants of the 16 milimeter world still existed –including the film editing facilities.  We still had a film library which contained clips of news stories from the past.  Those clips have long ago gone to some central depository or university collection.  We relied on clackety-clack wire machines for information on our stories…and sometimes the information was very difficult to find.

When I was first a newscast producer here, we had a tiny cramped control room and no computers.  We shot our stories on three-quarter inch videotape and we had stop watches to time our newscasts and the stories in them.

A few years later, we found ourselves writing our stories on computers with amber and black screens (remember them?) and the control room (and news studio) moved into what we all thought was the modern age.  (Computers helped time the shows, but I still remember the time I went one second over the show’s alloted time… despite the computer) Our camera crews traded the bulky 2-person 3/4 inch videotape decks for the one-person 1/2 format known as MII. It was progress even though many of us thought the pictures on MII could not match the format being used across town at other stations, known as Sony Betacam.  The slave-terminal computer system gave us access to several wire services –so we could research stories and not have to rush to the “wire room” when there was a bulletin.

It was progress.

Then our amber-and-black screen computers suddenly disappeared and we were given PC’s. They had access to the Internet. Wow! We could look up out of town newspapers and news websites and use this information to augment what was on the wires!

And the video cameras changed too.  MII went away and DVC Pro moved in.  The video cassettes were much smaller, but they still held the same amount of material.  The pictures were sharper.  More progress.

Now, we are heading into the Digital World.  Our computer screens are flat; the video screens in the new control room, are LCD.  By the end of summer, the room should be fully operational.

I hope the people who use these new wonder toys remember how fleeting they are.. Just one more change in an industry where change has always been the norm.

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Tags: KNBC, TV News