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Grass Valley Infinity Helps Indiana’s WFYI Produce
Local Programming in High Quality HD
March 31, 2009
Source: Thomson-Grass Valley
Every day, PBS member station WFYI in Indianapolis,
Indiana is using the Grass Valley Infinity Digital Media Camcorder
(DMC) in a variety of ways to produce several local programs
(“Good As Gold” and “Natural Heritage of Indiana”)
that it broadcasts on its HD channel along with the national
PBS HD program feed. Thanks in part to its new 2/3-inch Xensium
CMOS image sensor camcorder, the station’s HD on-air
look rivals that of larger market stations with bigger budgets.
Metropolitan Indianapolis Public Broadcasting Inc, licensee
for WFYI, has been passing through national HD programming
for the past five years, but was not doing any local HD origination
until it acquired the Infinity DMC this year. The camcorder
has become a favorite with the production staff as it easily
supports WFYI’s file-based production and post production
workflows with the ability to record at 100 mb/s and the flexibility
of using different media, such as CompactFlash, which is relatively
inexpensive compared to other forms of media.
The Infinity DMC is used primarily in the field capturing
both SD and HD images to produce several programs, such as
one of the station’s most popular shows – “Across
Indiana”— which highlights various towns in the
state. Footage is acquired on Grass Valley REV PRO™ media,
and then ingested into a Grass Valley EDIUS® nonlinear
editing system for HD editing.
“Our camera operators really enjoy the Infinity because
it’s easy to use and produces fantastic pictures in both
SD and HD,” said Nate Pass, chief engineer at WFYI. “I
like it because it’s a very robust camera and stands
up to daily production very well. I have not had a single
maintenance issue with the Infinity since we began using it.”
WFYI moved into its new, all-digital headquarters in downtown
Indianapolis in the fall of 2008 and is now broadcasting four
digital channels – with one in the 1080i HD format. To
support all of these channels and more, the station is using
dual Grass Valley Maestro™ master control panels (one
for redundancy), a Trinix™ digital video router (populated
with both HD and SD sources), a 256x256 Concerto™ Series
router for AES audio, an Encore™ Control System, and
four K2 media servers. The station continues to use its Grass
Valley 4000-3 digital switcher, which it brought over during
its move into the new building and has been operational for
more than 10 years.
“The Grass Valley Infinity Digital Media Camcorder is
the perfect tool for stations like WFYI, because it allows
them to shoot different programs at different resolutions
with the same camera and get high-quality results every time,”
said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “Customers
are asking for flexible production technologies that bring
high-value, and a fast return on investment and that’s
exactly what Grass Valley continues to deliver.”
The Grass Valley Infinity series of products — which
include the innovative DMC and its companion Digital Media
Recorder (DMR) — support the digital production migration
by enabling broadcasters and production professionals to capture,
transport, and share content within a file-based workflow
using IT industry standard media such as REV PRO and CompactFlash.
Once projects have been completed, the media can be shared,
archived, used to ingest final content to playout servers,
and re-used for acquisition.
The latest version of the Infinity camcorder, the DMC 1000/20,
uses the new XP and ER versions of REV PRO media. The Grass
Valley REV PRO media adds extra capacity (from 35 GB to 40
GB for XP and 65 GB for ER) to an already generous data storage
format. REV PRO XP is tuned for high performance and ultra-fast
ingest, while REV PRO ER focuses on capacity.
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