Situation

The WBTW-News 13 Operations Bureau in Myrtle Beach, SC serves as a production hub for the station and is located 70 miles away from the primary location in Florence, SC. The bureau had outgrown its existing facility. Additionally, more efficiency was needed to provide up-to-the-minute information sharing between station operations and the Florence location, as well as two daily and two weekly area newspapers and an on-line news outlet, SCNow.com, all holdings of Media General Corporation.

Professional Communications Systems (PCS) designed and integrated systems that would bring digital capability to News 13 in a state-of-the-art operations center being built on the site. The building would house a news room, a studio, a production control room, a weather center, editing suites, a sports area, multiple conference rooms, and a technical operations center.

Solution

A new automated production system was installed, allowing for the creation of complex effects, microphone control and graphic element recall through communications links with the ENPS newsroom system.

The system provides access to a variety of remote support feeds, as well as final packaged outputs from a new non-linear editing system. Thirty seven channels of incoming feeds from local and national sources are managed by an RF distribution system in lieu of more expensive and complex routing. Producers, editors and writers can now easily view these signals on traditional monitors in multiple locations.

A multiviewer system provides monitoring of a variety of critical feeds between the Myrtle Beach newscasts and the Florence master control systems, displaying multiple signals in user-configurable layouts. This provides switcher setup confirmation at a producer or director's glance toward dual plasma displays.

Results

The integration has increased efficiency of information sharing and allows for coordinated quality control.

New systems and a vastly improved physical plant have streamlined production of multiple newscasts, giving support to the station's goal of continued news leadership in the region.