WFFF-TV ("Fox44"), Vermont's Fox station serving the Burlington and Plattsburgh, N.Y. market (DMA no. 93), jumped to local-studio HD for its news, sports, weather and public affairs programming nearly a year ago. It's now using P2 HD camcorders from Panasonic for its ENG remotes—including four AG-HPX500s and two AG-HPX200s. (An additional pair of HPX500s also have been deployed as fixed cams in the station's news studios in Colchester, Vt.)
The Smith Media outlet says it covers most of upstate New York and New Hampshire, as well as nearly all of Vermont. Fox44 also produces newscasts for WVNY-TV, the market's ABC affiliate.
Fox44's news operations employ 20 desktop editing seats in its main newsroom where reporters can edit their stories in HD—running EDIUS NLE software on Dell computers. Each desktop is equipped with an AJ-PCD20 five-slot P2 drive for sequential access-and-editing capabilities for all recorded P2 content.
The station also maintains an HD satellite truck with an AJ-PCD20-equipped laptop running EDIUS. Edited ENG packages are fed over microwave (or satellite) to the studio via a FireWire bridge.
