Among the surprises at NAB 2007 were the many consumer and prosumer video products touted alongside vastly more expensive wares—the most attention-getting being Apple's Final Cut 2 Studio suite of production utilities and its companion, Final Cut Server.

To ready the software for the big leagues, Apple turned to CBS flagship KCBS and its sister station KCAL in LosAngeles. The stations took the bold step of migrating every promotion producer, graphic artist and editor to off-the-shelf Macs running the two Final Cut packages.

The new system debuted on the air the week after NAB, just a few days before the two stations dedicated their gleaming new high-def facility in Studio City.

Overseeing the transition was Marshall Hites, VP of creative services and promotion for both KCBS and KCAL. He and Design Director Otto Petersen spoke with TVNEWSDAY Contributing Editor Arthur Greenwald.

An edited transcript follows:

Coincidentally, I'm told I was the first producer to use the original Macintosh to draw an animation storyboard while at KDKA Pittsburgh 20 years ago. So it's amazing to see all you're able to do with consumer hardware.

HITES: Well, you know, our stations were creating graphics and animation using Macs back in 1997 and had very good success with the quality of the work. And many people looked askance at using consumer electronics to create professional work because we were all used to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on proprietary technology for production. Now along comes a $3,000 or $4,000 computer with maybe another $1,000 in software and we're doing very high level work.

And previously each piece of expensive equipment could do just a small part of the work.

HITES: Yes. Where before you had this proprietary box that performed one task, we have a much cheaper box that has a very open architecture. It's all software-based so the same Macintosh tower can do editing, graphics, animation or audio mixing. And it all uses essentially the same hardware framework with the various software applications and plug-ins.

How does the flexibility of these products impact your creative mission?

HITES: Well, first of all, they make it easier because we now have a completely interconnected and shared network on a Macintosh platform in our creative services area. Editors are using Final Cut Pro; designers are using Photoshop and After Effects to create graphics and animation. Others might use Pro Tools to do audio sweetening. All of these people might be working on the same television promo.

It used to be that all this work had to be done separately and sequentially. Now, everybody can open the same project at various times, make their contribution to the project and it doesn't have to happen in a specific order. That's a blessing to the work flow.

So far you've been talking mainly about the promotion work at KCAL and KCBS, but, of course, you also have to interface with the reporters for footage and so forth.

HITES: We do, indeed, and, in our new facility, we're able to pull them into our world and import their news footage into our work flow. Our news department uses a Grass Valley server and editing tools, so we use a protocol flipping device called Flip Factory. It translates the Grass Valley video codec for our Mac-based systems. It becomes one more piece of the puzzle, all organized digitally for our editor to build the spot.

That must save a ton of time.

HITES: Absolutely. The editor doesn't rely on "sneakernet." There's no more running downstairs for the news footage then over to graphics to grab the animation. No trips to the music library. All those assets are instantly available. It's a beautiful thing in terms of workflow.

Obviously the time you save is substantial. Does that actually impact the bottom line? Does it give you more resources?

HITES: What it does is give me more productivity. We're operating two television stations that do over 11 hours of local news. It's an enormous commitment to the market. Consequently, it's a huge commitment to promote all of those news programs, so we turn around an enormous amount of original material every day. We produce as many as 16 original topical news promos every single day. That's in addition to spots we do for sweeps or sports. We're the home of the Lakers and the Dodgers here.

We also do sales presentations for our account executives and a laundry list of other projects. All these products like Final Cut Server really increase our productivity, and that's what it's all about.

For those who don't know, what is Final Cut Server as opposed to Final Cut Studio?

HITES: Final Cut Studio is sort of like buying Microsoft Office but for video production. You get a lot of things in that creative bundle.

Final Cut Server is a software-based metadata server. It's navigational software first and foremost. Secondly, it's an organizational tool that lets us grab any production element and drag it into the project folder. The metadata tags also make it a powerful search engine.

In creative services alone, we have about 80 terrabytes of storage. That sounds like a lot, but in the HD world it's not. These are gigantic files. HD video takes about six times more storage space on a server array than standard-definition video. And, with so many projects, we can end up with thousands of video clips, hundreds of thousands of graphics, thousands of pieces of music. Thanks to metadata we can search through all these elements just like Google.

That must require no small amount of discipline. You must have to train everyone to stop at regular intervals to enter the metadata.

HITES: You've got to be very diligent about [filling in] the metadata because that becomes your search tool to go back and retrieve each asset. How many times have you stored something on your computer and a month later you wonder, "Where in the heck did I store that thing?" Well, imagine if you had 50 people using the same computer. How are you going to go back and find one specific file?

You've got to have extremely consistent rules and naming conventions in specific metadata fields, not only so you can retrieve it, but so that other people can too. It has to be a very religious thing, something that you do in a very diligent way.

KCBS and KCAL are naturally a union shop, with rules about separation of jobs and jurisdiction over equipment. Even so, are there ways in which the flexibility and power of these new tools makes the creative process more collaborative? For example, a graphic artist coming up with a music idea?

HITES: We're fortunate in our creative services group to have an entirely collaborative group of people. We've always encouraged the exchange of ideas. Certainly these tools make it easier to do that.

Another thing a you can do in Final Cut Server is add notes. A producer might say "See where the sun comes out from behind that building? It might make a great transition to that moment where the news van turns the corner." So you've got the assets plus the thought process.

OK, so it's flexible and powerful. But what's the learning curve like in Final Cut? How does it compare to other training you've been through?

HITES: Compared to some of the other tools we've had to embrace in this building, the Final Cut Server tool is extremely simple and very efficient to use. Once you get three or four operational protocols under your belt, it's very simple as long as you're diligent about entering that metadata.

You used [Diana] Weynand Training to teach the software to your staff. Was that useful?

HITES: Yeah, absolutely. Most of our editors were longtime Avid users. So Diana sent us a guy who specialized in making the transition from Avid to Final Cut. He was able to bring our people a very long way in a short amount of time.

He began with a "50,000-foot" overview of what the tool does, then quickly focused on common editing tasks and how to perform them in Final Cut.

Does all this digital technology make you a little nervous? There's something reassuring about being able to hold a videotape in your hand.

HITES: That's true. At first it's a little bit disconcerting that all your hard work is buried somewhere in cyberspace. But you quickly learn that the metadata makes it easy to find and retrieve stuff. Plus, we've installed a significant digital archive in our building.

And through a company called Front Porch Digital, we have a "hard digital archive" of our assets offsite. We have the ability to retrieve anything that airs in this facility, even if we somehow experience a big hard drive crash or lose parts of a server.

Design Director Otto Petersen explains how Final Cut Server evolved from Art Box, a Java-based product by Proximity Group, an Australian company purchased by Apple in 2006. He then uses his own graphics department Macintosh workstation to demonstrate how production elements come together.

PETERSEN: Using Final Cut Server we can quickly scan our SAN (storage area network) for any production element we need. Let's say we want footage with a sunset. So we just type "sunset" under "Search" and up comes every element that contains the word "sunset" in the metadata.

Petersen's screen instantly fills with thumbnail images of video, animation and still pictures, each depicting a different sunset.

PETERSEN: This is a still, but this is a piece of moving video. And you can scrub through the little thumbnail and display the motion in the shot and see how it looks. Each of these thumbnails is a proxy for the actual original file. And when you click on it, it accesses the original material, which goes right into your project folder without disturbing the original file. That stays safely on the server where we can always call it up.

Otto, if you don't mind my asking, how old are you?

PETERSEN: I'm 29 years old.

So you've been out of college less than 10 years. If you look ahead 10 years from now, what tools would you hope will exist that don't exist today?

PETERSEN: I think we're pretty much there where everything is at our fingertips and getting more and more accessible. But I look forward to when all the HD elements are directly accessed in real time. These proxies (on the screen) are just low-res placeholders for the actual high-def files. In 10 years, it will be the actual file that you're looking at in real time. That means instant access and no waiting times for anything.

It's still amazing to me that so much of the stuff you're using is really off-the shelf-technology. This is the same stuff you could buy if you bought it through your college bookstore.

PETERSEN: That's right. An old friend of mine from school runs the editing department at Columbia University in New York. They needed a system to cut a campus video together to preview it downtown where some professors or executives add their notes. So after they saw our little video at NAB, they called me to ask if the product could help them. And I told them, yes, it would definitely improve their work flow.

HITES: There are so many people actually doing that, particularly here in Los Angeles where we've got this incredibly large creative community. There are more and more people who, for $10,000 or $15,000, can fully equip a spare bedroom and be able to create full-blown HD television. There are certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of people out there just in Southern California who are now freelancing at the professional level with tools that are you can buy for a very, very reasonable amount of money.

(Watch Hites and Petersen demonstrate the new KCBS/KCAL hardware and software in this Apple Video from NAB 2007.)