WEIU’s All-Digital Workflow Successfully Launches Broadcast Careers
In 2004, Denis Roche had his hands full. He had just been hired as the director of engineering for Charleston, Ill.,-based WEIU, which includes the public television and radio stations affiliated with Eastern Illinois University, when he was asked to make his first equipment decisions fast. "On my first day, my boss came in and told me that we had some significant funds we needed to spend in the next 15 days," he says.
Roche had come on board with the specific charter to oversee a complete digital overhaul of the television station, so he knew where to focus his attention. He had multiple goals: to improve the efficiency of the station's operations, to attract more viewers and revenue, and to provide the best possible training environment for the university's journalism and communication students who use WEIU's news-production facilities to produce a daily half-hour newscast.
Wishing to avoid spending his first budgeted amounts unwisely, he spent some long days studying the television station's design and schematics. After extensive evaluation, he decided that his first step would be to add a shared-media networking solution for the station's postproduction needs. He explains, "There were three Avid [Media Composer] editing rooms, but they had no centralized storage. If a person started a job in edit room one, the job needed to be finished in edit room one. The workflow was non-existent, so the Avid Unity LANshare was the first piece we decided to add."
Roche also chose to upgrade the older Media Composer systems to better serve the specific editing needs of the station. He brought in four NewsCutter XP workstations to produce the daily half-hour newscast with its full complement of programming for news, sports, and weather. The NewsCutter XP systems are specifically designed for editing television news packages with fast, professional editing features such as Quick Record, and effects tools such as blur and automatic color correction.
They also offer seamless integration with the station’s 12 existing Avid iNEWS newsroom computer system clients, enabling students to view rundowns, write scripts, and drag-and-drop stories directly into the NewsCutter bin for the most efficient news-production process. In addition, Roche added a Media Composer Adrenaline system, with its advanced, real-time creative editing and effects toolset, for staff editors to cut station promos and original long-form programs such as Heartland Highways, a weekly half-hour show that highlights historic and tourist destinations in Illinois and Indiana,in SD or HD. All of the editing systems are connected to the LANshare EX shared-storage solution for simultaneous access to media and project files, enabling users to work on the same material at the same time, thereby reducing the time needed to produce any single project.
But that was not the end of the digital revamp, says Roche, “Once we had such success with Avid Unity, NewsCutter XP, and Media Composer Adrenaline, we decided to add MediaManager and an AirSpeed server, which allowed us to move news to a main server to free up some channel space. It also eliminated a bunch of tape decks,” says Roche. The iNEWS ControlAir automation-assist system, which provides automated rundown lists, tracks script changes, and automates control of production and playback devices, completed the news-production workflow.
"With a setup like ours, we attract more students to journalism and communication studies, and more students translates to more dollars for the university."
- Denis Roche, General Manager, WEIU
Fully Trained in News Production
As many as 15 students from the journalism and communication studies programs work on the daily half-hour WEIU newscast each semester. “We are a real-world training arm of those two departments,” says Roche. “Most of the time we have freshmen coming in the door, and they start working their first day at the TV station and many of them stay all four years.”
Students are trained in various areas of news production before they are given the opportunity to specialize. “No matter whether you want to be an anchor, a producer, or a technical director - you are indoctrinated in every aspect of news. Most do camera work in the field, plus reporting, writing, and editing. We want them to have all kinds of training - in playback, character generation, weather programming, you name it. Even if you just want to be a videographer, you need to know how the person downstream of you works with your material. On some level, you need to have a complete understanding of the news production process.”
JVC cameras with hard disks are used to capture DV25 footage for the newscast. “The hard drive is the size of a pack of cigarettes,” says Roche about the acquisition device. “We pull it out of the camera and take it into the editing room, connect it via FireWire, and two or three clicks later, the story is in the timeline. There is no ingest time. When editing is done, we just do a drag and drop to the AirSpeed server, so there is no e-gest time. Less time in the editing room means we can do more stories. The quality is much better too. We do everything in the digital domain. We don’t use baseband at all until the final playout.”
WEIU’s state-of-the-art setup is also supported in the classroom, where students learn beginning and advanced digital broadcast workflow techniques through training on Avid iNEWS, Media Composer, Avid Xpress Pro, and LANshare systems.
With approximately 9,000 full-time students and 3,000 graduate students, Eastern Illinois University offers a wide-ranging digital news production setup that few other institutions can match. “We go up every year for awards against some of the biggest schools in the country - North Carolina, Penn State, Florida State, USC,” says Roche. Among other local and national awards, the Broadcast Education Association recently recognized WEIU students with awards for Outstanding TV News Anchor, 2005 (Whitney Self) and Outstanding TV Weather Anchor, 2006 (Jenni Ketchmark). The newscast itself received recognition as an Outstanding TV Newscast Finalist in 2006.
Broadcast news is the primary focus for students who are trained on the Avid systems at WEIU. “We want to train students on the format they’ll see in the field.” To support that goal, Roche has just placed an order for 10 seats of the Avid iNEWS Instinct system, a visual storytelling tool that intuitively combines newsroom, script, and video assets in a familiar script-based format. He is also adding Avid Unity TransferManager software to support a completely seamless file transfer capability from ingest through playout.
“In news, we are entirely tapeless at this point. When I go to conventions, and listen to people describe the slickest, most high-tech newsrooms, I say to them, ‘We are already doing that with Avid,’” says Roche.
“The bottom line is that our students can say, ‘If you hire me, I can sit in your newsroom and be productive immediately.’”
- Denis Roche, General Manager, WEIU
Achieving Multiple Goals
So far, the strategy for preparing students to enter the workforce fully ready to use professional broadcast equipment is working well. EIU graduates are currently employed by numerous broadcast organizations throughout the country, including CNN, CBS 2 in Chicago, and WENY in New York.
Roche sees WEIU’s business goals as working hand-in-hand with Eastern Illinois University’s educational objectives. While the end-to-end, news-production workflow enables students and staff to produce top-quality news packages, promos, and original programming that attracts more viewers, it also attracts a stronger base of financial support for both the station and the university. “With a setup like ours, we attract more students to journalism and communication studies, and more students translates to more dollars for the university,” says Roche. “We are just starting to see that with students who have Avid background on their resume. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy if you do it right.”
Roche cites the experience of a 2006 graduate as an example. “Right at the top of her resume, it said, ‘Totally trained in an iNEWS environment.’ When she went on an interview at a news station in Indianapolis, her interviewer said, “I can’t believe you know all this stuff about Avid [systems] - you are completely trained!’ The bottom line is that our students can say, ‘If you hire me, I can sit in your newsroom and be productive immediately.’”
The university also offers a summer news internship program in which approximately 12 students from across the country create and deliver broadcast news while serving as anchors, reporters, and producers. Some students have even transferred to Eastern Illinois University after participating in WEIU’s summer program. “I hear students say, ‘I learned more in a summer here than I did in my first two years at [another] college. I got real hands-on training with the kinds of things I need on my resume that I can demonstrate to employers,’” says Roche.
Roche is pleased that he has been able to accomplish WEIU’s digital transformation so cost effectively, and he credits Avid’s educational programs as essential to achieving his goals. “We’ve done all of this work with relatively limited funds and got a lot of bang for the buck,” he says. “Avid has a very good discount for universities. We are extremely happy with the pricing they gave us. It shows me that - even in a large company like Avid - their people care, and that’s important. They absolutely sold me.”
* CREDIT: Courtesy of WEIU Newswatch