Chattanooga based WRCB has recently installed a Quantel Newsbox system to deliver its daily news production. WRCB Channel 3 is an NBC affiliate serving Southeastern Tennessee, Northwestern Georgia, Northeastern Alabama, and Southwestern North Carolina.
WRCB was In the Mood for a new production system so veteran Production Manager Doug Loveridge set off on a fact-finding mission to NAB 06 in Las Vegas. Doug met with several vendors at the show, and was particularly impressed with the Quantel Newsbox. A couple of weeks later, the WRCB project team comprising journalists, reporters, editors and producers visited KWTX in Waco, TX, who installed a Quantel sQ news system in 2005. I went to NAB in April and we went live on 13th November so it was a super-fast project, says Loveridge.
One of the reasons we went with Quantel is that we purchased a Picturebox 12 years ago and it is still in daily use; you dont get much better ROI than that! We have had very few problems with it, but when weve needed support it was excellent and it has meant that in those 12 years we have never been off-air.
The WRCB news system comprises 8 sQ Cut journalist workstations, two sQ Edit seats for craft editors and an eQ multi-resolution editing, visual effects and color correction system which produces promos. The existing Picturebox will also continue in service alongside the Newsbox still producing that old black magic. This is a great set-up as everyone can be working on the same piece of video; the journalist is putting the story together, the producer can do a quick V/O and the editor can make a trail for the nightly news all at the same time, Loveridge added.
The Newsbox takes care of all the news programming for WRCB from the Sunrise to the Moonlight Serenade; namely the Channel 3 Eyewitness News from 5am – 7am, the Live at Five show the 5:30 news and Eyewitness News programmes at 6pm and 11pm – a total of over 4 ½ hours of news programming per day.
With local news speed to air is key – we are making news on the fly. While the news is happening we can send a photographer to the scene, ingest the footage into the Newsbox and air the story while it is actually happening – that is a beautiful thing, says Loveridge.
Archiving is also made easy. As Loveridge explains, Typically murder cases can take months to come to court and we can get the original story back real quick as we dont have to dub it to tape. This is a much simpler workflow but also as space is money we have been able to free up a lot of room at the station as we dont need a tape store.
The fact that the Newsbox came with 5 years QCare was very important to us, concludes Loveridge. Dave Black and the Quantel team really took care of us. They were very responsive and made us feel that we really mattered to them. Quantel engineers were here throughout the installation and the go live. We didnt need to call on them at go live as everything went like a dream, but it was great to have them there, and its great to know they will fully support us in the future too.