Anchors prepare for the 5:00 newscast.

On the set of the 5:00 News at Clear Channel-owned ABC affiliate KTVX in Salt Lake City, it’s easy to see why the show is leading its time slot. An attractive anchor team gleams on a polished set, the sports guy brings requisite clips and quips, and the weather presenter, Prospero-like, waves virtual storms across a magically responsive map. It’s news business as usual, brought off unusually well.

But off camera, long before the evening show airs, a more potent news advantage plays out in the KTVX ENG (electronic news gathering) vans, where lightweight DV cameras and PowerBook-anchored Final Cut Pro editing stations let reporters and photographers shape their stories where they break.

By running their captured footage immediately from their FireWire-connected Sony DSR370 cameras into their PowerBooks, the crews are able to pull shots, edit them into sequences and capture the optimal video back to DV tape — all in the van. This means photographers know at once that they got their shots, reporters get more say in structuring their stories and time-starved in-house editors get handoffs of clean footage instead of the usual raw tape.

Editing at the Edge
For KTVX director of engineering David Bird, who made the decision to swap out the station’s legacy cuts-only editing systems for a fleet of flexible Power Macs, the change has extended and strengthened his fundamental news capabilities. “Pushing editing out to the edge of our story coverage with Final Cut and the laptops was huge,” he says, “but equally big was the transformation of our in-house workflow.”

Also extended was the station’s concept of local coverage, which suddenly reached into Iraq and Guatemala, not only because local soldiers or Mormon missionaries were making news there, but because the inexpensive, transportable editing stations made remote coverage viable. “Gulf War Greetings” and other news stories filed by a freelance news reporter carrying a consumer-level Sony DV camera, PowerBook and satellite modem were global hits with the local audience — at a total equipment cost of only $3,500.

Extreme Switcher
Although Bird, until recently a dedicated Windows user, speaks ardently of the benefits delivered by the new system, he confesses that his decision to supplant an accepted traditional fixed editing system with Final Cut Pro flexed editing suites was made more for money than for love.

“When Clear Channel took over this station, the first thing the production and promotion departments said is we need two additional legacy stations at $150,000 each. We said, that’s not going to happen,” says Bird.

Instead, Bird added several CinéWave-based Final Cut suites in his production and promotions departments to handle special reports, commercials and effects. The new systems yielded highly-produced sweeps segments and an Emmy Award-winning new on-air look that was completed faster and for considerably less cost than under the old system.

Then — after a year of test-editing news on Final Cut — in just two weeks KTVX replaced their four legacy editing suites with nine Final Cut Pro fixed editing bays (two in sports, seven in news), anchored by dual-processor Power Macs and extended by nine field-friendly PowerBooks.

“We switched just before May books last year, which normally carries a high pucker factor. But we’ve got good management, and the people were willing to work with it, so we just gutted everything and put it in live between shows. We’re very comfortable here with mix and match,” says Bird.

Role Play
Somewhat less comfortable, but equally efficient, was the more radical cut-in of edge editing, which required a significant staged adjustment of roles and workflow.

“Moving the edit process out to the edge meant that photographers who in their tape-to-tape lives never used computers now could edit their own stories,” says Bird. “And reporters who never carried a piece of gear were sitting down to work with laptops. They do it because they want to own the story. If they edit the story until it’s close to finished, nobody’s going to re-do it. The editors just touch it up.”

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