WGXA Upgrades Station to HD with Video Technics Solutions

Michael Dixon, information technology director at WGXA-TV in Macon, Ga.
ATLANTA: WGXA employed Video Technics in an upgrade that included taking news hi-def, going tapeless and fully automating master control. The station went with an integrated Video Technics platform that covered all areas of the news production and playout with ENPS, as well as end-to-end master control operations for ingest, prepping, and play-to-air automation with traffic interfaces to Wide Orbit.

The MOS-enabled NewsFlow system from Video Technics works with ENPS and runs alongside the WorkFlow Complete master control automation system. The two logical systems offer economies of scale by sharing common software and hardware components that include 10 channels of Apella HDS High Definition Servers with a total of 24 TB of local cache storage, two high performance NAS servers for a total of 32 TB total of shared storage, and two HD VT Media Exchange Servers to handle file-based ingest with redundancy.

The VT Media Archive Library was incorporated for offline archiving to LTO-5 media. In addition to the hardware configuration, this turnkey solution also included 30 seats of the VT Proxy Editor software for use in the newsroom with ENPS as a MOS plug-ins and a few seats in master control for low-res media prepping. Several nonlinear editor plug-ins were provided for their Final Cut Pro Workstations and others, VT Director for news playout with MOS, and two VT Scheduler PRO clients for master control play-to-air automation.