Looking to streamline its operations and make its staff more productive, WPVI-TV, the ABC owned-and-operated station in Philadelphia, is now equipping a brand new digital news production facility with HD technology from Grass Valley. The all-digital, HD facility will be fully operational in September and include a comprehensive file-based production workflow for the station’s local newscasts and other programs broadcast in the 720p HD format.
For daily news production, the station is installing a storage area network (SAN) featuring mirrored Grass Valley K2 Summit servers and 1000 hours of HD storage. The news production department will implement the full Grass Valley Aurora News Production platform, including Aurora Ingest, 75 seats of Aurora Browse, and Aurora Play software modules. HD editing will be completed with nine Grass Valley Aurora Edit and a dozen EDIUS nonlinear editing workstations.
To handle all of its daily newscasts, the station will use a fully redundant Grass Valley Ignite HD integrated production system — complete with a 4 M/E Kayak HD production switcher. Commercial insertion will be accomplished with a Grass Valley K2 master control server system with 1000 hours of storage and a Grass Valley BaseCamp browse system (tightly integrated with a PathFire Digital Media Gateway system to ingest news feeds, syndicated programs and other content).
