A Field Guide To TV News Editing

Television news editing has quickly moved from the TV station to the field. Now, more than ever, stories are being edited on laptops from where the news is happening or in nearby coffee shops or even at a reporter’s home.

This shift, over the past two years, comes as a tough economy has caused news operations to downsize staff and do more stories with fewer producers and reporters who are busier than ever. In addition to newscasts, they now must feed websites and mobile devices in a never-ending 24/7 news cycle.

“Traditional news roles are disappearing. There used to be writers, reporters, editors and producers. Now one person is being asked to do all of these things,” says Jeff Broderick, product manager for Grass Valley’s Aurora news editing system. “This has caused vendors of news production equipment to create simpler user interfaces and much tighter integration that allows a single operator to move from one task to another.”

At Avid, a major newsroom systems competitor to Grass Valley, there’s agreement about the rapid pace of change in newsrooms.

“We are probably going through a period of greater change now than ever before,” says Patrick McClean, Avid’s director of segment marketing for post and broadcast. “The forces of the economy and technology are very strong and being felt by our customers. We are constantly adapting.”

Key to the transformation is the editing software running on the laptops. It varies from specific, simplified workflow tools for cutting basic video to full craft editors with the capability to handle a range of formats in different resolutions and aspect ratios.

Many companies, even those without complete newsroom automation systems, are competing in the news editing market. And some stations mix several brands of editing systems with news automation from different vendors.

This is possible due to MOS (Media Object Server), an XLM-based protocol for transferring information between newsroom automation systems. A refined MOS protocol has created a wide level of interoperability among the news systems of many vendors.

The field edit systems are designed to work with small, low-cost HD cameras that record video onto solid state media as well as conventional ENG camcorders.

Most can handle proxies — low resolution, low bitrate copies of the source footage — in a fast, efficient way. Only when the story is complete are the high resolution shots needed. This contributes to speed in the field.

Another important feature of field editing is smart rendering, says Fred Fourcher, CEO of Bitcentral, a maker of newsroom automation technology. Many of the new cameras use a long GOP format that enables smart rendering, he says.

“Smart rendering means that you are not re-encoding the bits. These cameras produce transportable formats. They are already compressed and very small,” he says. “Editing without re-rendering requires fewer processor cycles on the laptop. All the laptop is doing is stitching together the frames of the transitions.”

With a modern news production system, Fourcher says field reporters can go from the camera to air without re-encoding. “In news, time is the most important thing and this saves lots of time.”

Apple’s Final Cut Pro is a leading full-feature editor that can be used in the field or as a craft editor back at the station. Most broadcasters with complete news automation systems can integrate Apple’s technology into their systems.

Supporting a broad range of video formats, Final Cut Pro edits in SD or HD; has ProRes, a popular Apple codec; and uses open standards like Quicktime, FxPlug and XML interchange.

Apple declined to comment for this story.

At Grass Valley, the solution is Edius, a full-featured, craft-style editor that can run on a laptop and take just about any format. Aurora is a stripped-down editor supporting fewer formats and offering a more simplified editing interface. Both are used by reporters in the field on laptops.

At IBC2010 in Amsterdam, beginning Sept. 9, Grass Valley will introduce Edius 6, a new version of the editing system. Users will have the ability to work with any video standard up to 1080p50/60 or even 4K digital cinema resolution.

All major codecs in use in the industry will be supported natively, with no transcoding required even when different compression formats are mixed on the timeline. Preview effects will be viewable in real time. 

At Avid, the problem of handling various formats has been addressed through Avid Media Access, a plug-in architecture that allows the quick support of new formats by creating a new plug-in. For example, Avid recently added support for Canon’s digital SLR system, an emerging competitor to standard ENG cameras used for newsgathering.

KTBS, the ABC affiliate in Shreveport, La., is installing a complete Avid system, including several variations of Newscutter editors in the field, iNews automation, ISIS shared storage, DS graphics and full-featured Media Composer editors. The station also upgraded to Sony HDcams, making a transition to HD and a completely tapeless work environment.

“At the same time we changed the workflow of our news department from the standard reporter-photographer approach to the multimedia journalist,” GM George Sirven says. “In news, one person now does it all, from reporting, shooting, editing and writing the story. The reporter can either do it here at the station or file from a laptop on location.”

Sirven says his station went through the same budget cuts as others. “We had to do more with less. Now we have more product than ever before on all our outlets.”

The station’s current staff was trained for the new workflow, and KTBS has 13 one-person multimedia news crews. “Many have embraced the change, some have questioned it and a couple have just left the business, saying it has changed too much,” Sirven says.

Another important dimension of the editing-in-the-field phenomenon is how the edited video is sent back to the station. Reporters have a range of choices, including microwave, satellite, aircards, Wi-Fi and even 3G smartphones.

There are also vendor-specific solutions, like Bitcentral’s Oasis, a Web browser-based local archive and content aggregation network, that allows reporters to bypass slower FTP by using a special protocol for two to five times faster ingest from the field. Also if the connection is broken, Oasis will take over where it left off when the connection resumes.

Raycom Media, owner of 40 TV stations, uses Oasis at all of them. When a reporter uploads a story to the system, all other Raycom stations — which are tied together via the Internet — can see the story and pull it down via the Web for use if they choose to air it. The speed is nearly instantaneous.

“Mileage will always vary on upload speeds on the Internet,” says Charles Gray, Raycom’s director of new media content. “It’s like the interstate highway. If you’re the only one using it, you can really move,” he said. “If it’s congested and crowded, that’s something else.

“That’s why we give our reporters different methods to get the story home,” he says. “Sometimes an e-mail from a cell phone is the more efficient way to deliver a story.”

Because their gear is not just serving broadcast television anymore, news system vendors are including technology to service the Web and mobile devices in their systems.

Grass Valley offers MediaFUSE, a package of automated tools that helps broadcasters provide such non-broadcast content. It has a hot folder operation to efficiently manage repurposing file-based content for multi-distribution to the Web or to mobile platforms. A reporter simply moves his edited story to the MediaFUSE folder from his field laptop to feed other program services.

Avid has similar technology, but at IBC it will go further with a demonstration of full Web-based news editing. “Users will be able to do operations over an iPhone on a 3G network up to a full editor that can run on a Java client,” says Avid’s McClean. “We are not yet shipping a product, but are showing it to our customers to see how it might fit within their operations.”

In the modern TV newsroom, manufacturers of end-to-end systems are now focusing on a process that involves all aspects of the story. The portable tools of the multimedia reporter working in the field are integral to that process.

All the story elements — including video, audio, text, graphics, Web links and metadata — are brought together in the field and remain as a single entity throughout the modern newsroom system. This is where all multimedia editing — from field to air — is headed.