WSOC-TV, Cox Television’s ABC affiliate in Charlotte, NC, has deployed 25 AJ-HPX2000 shoulder-mount multiformat 2/3in P2 HD camcorders for all ENG operations.
The broadcaster, along with its cable duopoly, WAXN-TV, has been broadcasting all local news in HD since April 2007.
Last year, Atlanta-based Cox Television announced that it would extend conversion of newsgathering operations at its 15 TV stations to Panasonic’s P2 HD solid-state memory recording system.
WSOC-TV is shooting news in SD 16:9 aspect ratio at 25Mb/s and upconverting to 720p for broadcast, said Dave Siegler, WSOC director of broadcast operations and engineering. When the station begins HD acquisition, the P2 camcorders will be used to acquire HD footage from the field, he added.
Since the end of May, all of the station’s news photographers have been shooting with the AJ-HPX2000 camcorders and have made the adjustment to shooting 16:9 while protecting for 4:3.
Each HPX2000 is assigned five 8GB cards, and because the cameras are hot swappable, one photographer can copy material onto a second photographer’s card when a crew comes in to take over a story.
News reports are edited in the field on Avid NewsCutter XP systems. Once material is sent back to the station, further treatment, if desired, is done on Avid NewsCutter Adrenaline systems. WSOC/WAXN broadcast more than 33 hours of local news weekly.
Earlier this month, WSOC-TV aired a 30-minute weather special, “Surviving the Storm,” shot in entirely in P2 HD 100Mb/s video with an HPX2000.
For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/broadcast and www.wsoctv.com.
