KEYC Upgrades To HD With NewsFlow Complete

United Communications-owned CBS affiliate KEYC Mankato, Minn. (DMA 198), has made the conversion to high-definition newscasts with the help of NewsFlow Complete, a fully integrated news production system from Video Technics and Comprompter that coordinates scripting, ingesting, editing, organizing and presenting newscasts.

KEYC News Director Dan Ruiter said, “We knew what we wanted to achieve here at KEYC and we knew we had a strict budget to meet our objectives. Not only does the NewsFlow Complete system meet our workflow needs, but it was within our budget as well.”

NewsFlow Complete is designed to handle all text data and media feeds from ingest, through editing, on-air playback; to archive. Built with non-proprietary, IT-based components, NewsFlow Complete is a combination of software and hardware that handles the real-time collaboration of the entire news production and scripting workflow from start to finish.

The NewsFlow Complete solution for KEYC includes the Apella HDS video server, VT Media Exchange Server with Java plug-ins and the VT Proxy Editor running with NewsKing to provide low resolution editing.

The Apella HDS is a multi-channel HD/SD media server that supports a mixed database of DV and MPEG-2 files. The 3RU chassis features front-loading hot-swappable drive bays with up to 8 TB of internal raid storage. Virtually unlimited channel I/O can be implemented simply by networking Apella servers together. Extensive native codec technology, DVCPRO HD, and MPEG-2 up to 300 Mb/s, and support for mixed AVI, MOV and MXF file types, allows media files in the VT database — regardless of SD/HD standard, compression format, or file type — to be played back-to-back from a single output channel.

Ruiter added: “NewsFlow Complete provides my team the freedom to use HD and SD media in multiple formats while creating a single rundown. This flexibility along with the proven integration with my existing newsroom system and nonlinear editor platforms was the key to my decision to move forward with this solution.”