Complete NAB 2011 Coverage
Allbritton Communications Company is standardizing on JVC ProHD cameras for studio and electronic news gathering at six of its ABC affiliate stations. The new cameras are part of an overall transition to local HD news production for all stations in the group.
Allbritton began planning to upgrade its facilities to HD two years ago, and spent almost five months researching and testing cameras, explained Jim Church, director of technology, in a statement.
"We had specific things that we needed from our cameras, we had specific workflows in mind," he noted. "The image quality was critical. At the end of it all, we only found one vendor. It was JVC."
Church also noted that the cameras allowed them to maintain MPEG-2 and that the JVC ProHD format provided 19 Mbps and 35 Mbps workflow options that worked with the existing IT infrastructures.
The cameras also allowed them to use low-cost SDHC cards and offered native file recording for Adobe Premiere Pro, which was already in use throughout the station group.
In addition, the small lightweight camcorders worked well with their revamped news operations. "Most of our stations already had one-man crews with multimedia journalists. JVC's workflow embraced it," Church said in a statement. "They gave us the ability to have a lightweight camera that anyone can handle - and SD cards that we could use in any laptop, which allowed the multimedia journalists to edit in the field on a laptop and feed the material back via FTP."
The station group has purchased 25 studio cameras and 107 ENG cameras, including GY-HM790U and GY-HM750U shoulder-mount models, as well as about 10 compact handheld GY-HM100Us. The cameras are being distributed to WHTM-TV serving Harrisburg-Lancaster-Lebanon-York, Penn. (DMA #39); WCFT/WJSU/WBMA in Birmingham-Anniston-Tuscaloosa, Ala. (DMA #40); KATV in Little Rock-Pine Bluff, Ark. (DMA #56); KTUL in Tulsa, Okla. (DMA #61); WSET-TV in Roanoke-Lynchburg, Va. (DMA #66); and WCIV in Charleston, S.C. (DMA #98).
