ABC O & O WPVI-TV in Philadelphia (DMA 4) is finishing up equipping its new digital news production facility with mostly Grass Valley systems. The digital operations center includes a new system infrastructure, digital news and production capabilities, a master control, and signal routing components.

The all-digital facility is slated to go into full operation by September.

Despite its ongoing digital expansion, WPVI-TV and HD are hardly strangers: In 2006, the station became the first in the market (and among the first nationally) to begin airing its local newscasts in HD. The new Grass Valley systems currently undergoing installation are designed to support a comprehensive file-based production scheme workflow for the station's 720p content.

For daily news production, WPVI-TV will use a Grass Valley storage area network (SAN) featuring mirrored servers (K2 Summit) and 1,000 hours of mirrored HD storage. The station also plans to use Grass Valley's Aurora news production platform, and HD editing will be handled with nine Grass Valley Aurora edit, and a dozen Edius, nonlinear workstations.

In-house HD signal distribution will be based around a Grass Valley Trinix 352 x 256 HD router with embedded audio.