WFSB

After forty-six years in its well-known downtown Hartford building known as Broadcast House, WFSB decided to move its facilities to the suburb of Rocky Hill. The facility infrastructure is centered on a SD or HD-SDI capable router with embedded audio. All widely-used devices or signals are converted to conform to this standard. Many remote cameras connect by external analog circuits, are routed through an analog video router, and converted to digital through a pool of composite decoders. A third router solely serves production set monitoring. Each of these routers is linked together through the use of encoders, decoders, and HD up-converters to allow reuse of sources in any format. The Grass Valley Encore system’s Tie-Line Manager provides intelligent routing between the video formats and physical routers. 

Two identical Grass Valley Ignite-based rooms were built for scripted productions. A third traditionally-designed production room was built for larger complex productions. Each control room could, in turn, use one or both of the studios.

The complexity created by this interoperability posed questions of how to easily manage delegation of switcher aux busses to on-set monitoring, assignment of mixer mix-minus outputs to field IFB circuits, routing of program return audio and video monitoring to the studios, tally of cameras and on-air lights, and control of other common production resources (CPR). The solution rested largely in using the TSI1000 hardware built by Image Video. Known as a tally system by most; its ability to retrieve cross-point data from routing systems and production switchers, expandable GPI interfaces, customizable control panels, and textual display capabilities made it an ideal choice.

By means of a few push buttons and based on the status of particular router cross-points, the system determined through a series of customized, sophisticated logic statements how CPR should be assigned. Router cross-points are directly controlled and GPI interfaces command all other systems. An interface to the Evertz MVP provides status information displays to users. The operations staff is able, without engineering assistance, to set up control rooms for live or recorded productions.