WHYY, the public television station serving the greater Philadelphia market, has chosen the CopperHead line of fiber-optic video transceivers from Telecast Fiber Systems to support its transition to HD operations.
The station has mounted the CopperHead G2 2400 transceivers on Sony PDW700 XDCAM HD camcorders in its studios in Philadelphia and Wilmington, DE, to enable the cameras to be used in the studio as well as in the field. This has allowed the station to continue SD production as it completes the build-out of new HD control room and related facilities.
WHYY recently upgraded its two studios with the Sony camcorders rather than purchase fixed studio cameras. Each studio is equipped with three camcorders, and each one is outfitted with a CopperHead G2 2400, which multiplexes all of the camera's output and input signals onto a single, lightweight fiber-optic cable.
In addition, WHYY has installed a CopperHead control unit in its Y-Arts mobile production van, allowing any one of the Philadelphia camcorders to be taken into the field for multicamera, remote production operations. Any of these camcorders can easily be taken into the field for electronic field production as well.
The CopperHeads enable capabilities like camera control, tally lights, teleprompters and sync. They also allow producers to access the camcorders’ onboard recording capabilities. Each camera can simultaneously record its output locally on an XDCAM-HD disk while being used by a live control room switcher. Isolated camera capture is then instantly available for use during post-production editing.
