WGXA Macon Upgrades To HD With Video Technics

Having made the decision to transition news production to HD, Fox affiliate WGXA Macon, Ga. (DMA 118), sought a single solution that would not only meet this immediate need, but also position the station to seamlessly upgrade its master control operations. “We wanted to update our news department from SD to HD and to move away from tape to tapeless and at the same time upgrade master control from partial-automation to full automation,” said Michael Dixon, the Frontier Radio Management station’s information technology director.

During the design and selection process, WGXA had a list of criteria that all prospective vendors were evaluated against including reliability, scalability, excellent customer service, and affordability. Video Technics was chosen, the station said, because it met all criteria by providing an integrated platform that is responsible for all areas of the 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 offer economies of scale by sharing common software and hardware components that include 10 channels of Apella HDS high-definition servers with a total of 24 TB of local “cache” storage; two high-performance NAS servers for a total of 32 TB 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 off-line archiving to LTO-5 media. In addition to the hardware configuration, this turnkey solution also included 30 seats of the VT Proxy Editor software for use in the newsroom with ENPS as MOS plug-ins and a few seats in master control for low-res media prepping. Several nonlinear editor plug-ins were provided for Final Cut Pro work stations and others; VT Director for news playout with MOS; and two VT Scheduler PRO clients for master control play-to-air automation.