TV Azteca Goes Tapeless with Ikegami Editcam3

Mexican broadcaster TV Azteca is standardizing its tapeless production enviroment on the Ikegami Editcam platform.

The Ikegami DNS-33W Editcam3 is a 520,000-pixel advanced interline transfer (AIT) CCD camcorder that records up to three hours of nonlinear 50 Mbps digital video on an 80 GB hard-disk-based FieldPak2 cartridge.

The broadcaster is making the transition from tape to full digital nonlinear production for everything--news, sports, entertainment and musical programming, according to Jorge Pickering, director of production services, TV Azteca.

For editing, TV Azteca uses Avid systems.

"We have a huge infrastructure of Avid editing, which we started using for news in 1997," Pickering said. "We have standardized on five Avid Unity-based networks and have scored of Avid editing systems."

Additionally, the Spanish-language broadcaster is acquiring 36 SAT-110 readers to feed FieldPak 2 video for reporters' laptop editors.