WGXA-TV, FOX24/ABC16 in Macon, GA, approached its transition to HD news production with a pair of goals: satisfying the immediate need to produce high definition local news in a tapeless workflow and simultaneously upgrading its master control operations from partial to full automation.
According to station information technology director Michael Dixon, WGXA developed a list of criteria to evaluate competitive systems for the project, which included reliability and scalability. The station selected Video Technics to provide an integrated platform to handle all areas of news production and playout with ENPS, as well as end-to-end master control operations for ingest, prepping, and play-to-air automation with traffic interfaces to Wide Orbit.
The MOS-enabled NewsFlow system from Video Technics works with ENPS and runs alongside the WorkFlow Complete master control automation system. The two systems share common software and hardware components that include 10 channels of Apella HDS high-definition servers with a total of 24TB of local cache storage, two NAS servers for a total of 32TB total of shared storage, and two HD VT Media Exchange Servers to handle file-based ingest with redundancy. The VT Media Archive Library was incorporated for offline archiving to LTO-5 media.
In addition to the hardware configuration, the turnkey system includes 30 seats of the VT Proxy Editor software for use in the newsroom with ENPS as a MOS plug-in and a few seats in master control for low-res media prepping. Several NLE plug-ins were provided for the station's Final Cut Pro workstations, VT Director for news playout with MOS and two VT Scheduler PRO clients for master control play-to-air automation.
