BLAZING A NEW ENG TRAIL WITH JVC ProHD

Two weeks ago, TVNEWSDAY reported that the industry seemed to be splitting down the middle on tapeless, high-def ENG formats.

Some were adopting the Sony XDCAM with its optical disk recording; others were going with the Panasonic P2, which captured video on proprietary solid-state memory cards.

But before the pixels were dry on that story, the Scripps station group announced that it was going in an entirely different direction—JVC ProHD.

Under the deal, Scripps is purchasing more than 150 GY-HD250 ProHD camcorders, over 150 BR-HD50s ProHD recorder/players, more than 300 DR-HD10060G HD hard disk recorders and approximately 100 DTV monitors.

The deal elevates JVC to a serious third contender in the lucrative station ENG market.

Scripps is an important customer. Operating 10 network-affiliated TV stations, Scripps ranks No. 15 among TV station groups with $439 million in 2006 revenue.

According to Scripps VP of Engineering Michael Doback, Scripps worked closely with JVC over the past year to transform what had originally been a cinematographer’s camera to one optimized for news.

That primarily involved coupling the GY-HD250 to a compact Focus Enhancements hard drive that can record up to 10 hours of 720P HD video, Doback says.

Scripps was familiar with the hard drive, having used it in in the field for three years and built work flows around it.

Other features of the camcorder include a redundant HDV tape recorder and built-in encoder and ASI bridge that allows the users to send live video via coax cable directly into the transmitter of the microwave van.

In this interview Doback talks about how Scripps came to its decision about JVC, and how it fits into the group’s work flow and business plans.

Why JVC?

I can honestly say, without any reservations, that there are no trade-offs with this product and, by and large, it does things that the other products can’t do.

And those things are?

The other products cannot do an ASI bridge and that is very significant in the world of live ENG. Other cameras don’t have pool inputs so you can’t record a pool feed if you’re in that kind of a situation. Some of the other cameras can’t record dual media. You don’t have a tape backup if you have a hard drive failure. I mean, if you fail, you’re out of business. They don’t have the extremely competitive price advantage that this product has.

I would want to say that Sony and Panasonic and other companies make really great products that make really good pictures, but, at the end of the day it’s all about work flow and cost value because this is a business and we work through a business plan.

Tell us about the evaluation process.

Last fall, we put together a committee of news people, engineers and some business people to take a look at the offerings from the various manufacturers, and we set up a methodology for testing the products from Sony, Panasonic, Canon and JVC.

We would test all the products in the studio under controlled conditions. We would be shooting exactly the same material with the same lighting with the same monitors and the same test equipment. And the same people were doing the evaluation so we made things as standard across the test bed as possible.

Then we gave each of the manufacturers private time in our conference area so that we could ask questions and they could maybe discuss things privately that they would not have done in a shoot out-environment.

Keep in mind that we’re looking for quality of image, we’re looking for how does it fit into our work flow, we’re looking for robustness, we’re looking at what we’re going to get for our buck. Another very important consideration is the service reputation of the organization that we would be doing business with.

And as part of this, we came up with a number of categories and we assigned a metric to each of those categories. At the end of the day, we simply added up the numbers.

So you added up the numbers and… 

And much to our surprise, the JVC camera was number one.

None of us expected that. Well, we had some inkling when we started doing work flow that there were going to be some significant advantages to the JVC products, and that did prove to be the tipping point that gave them the numerical advantage at the end of the day.

So it was mostly this work flow advantage as opposed to it’s just being a cheaper camera that put it over the top?

The price was not the first consideration going into this. The camera had to make good pictures, it had to be competitive with the other cameras in terms of the image quality and the sensitivity of the camera.

We had all of these set up in the studio. One of the engineers working on the project looked at me after looking at the JVC camera sitting next to the $50,000 studio camera and he said, “This camera makes you wonder why we would ever spend $50,000 for a studio camera.” It looks that good. And, in some respects, it might even have looked a little better than the $50,000 studio camera.

But you said work flow was the key.

About three years ago, we started down the road of tapeless in standard definition. At our Detroit station, we started playing with editing in the field on laptop computers and going to pretty much tapeless.

We picked some cameras that were made by Sony and we hooked those cameras up to Focus Enhancements hard drives. We mounted the hard drives on Macintosh laptops in the field. We changed our paradigm to doing 98 percent of the editing in the field in the trucks.

The work flow turned out to be really quite nice. It worked out very well.

It’s very effective for us. It has allowed us to do more with less human resources faster and better and we wanted to continue that as we made the move to HD field acquisition.

One of the most important qualities of the JVC product is the way it integrates into our work flow.

You mentioned the ASI bridge. What’s the importance there?

If we want to do a live shot, the FireWire coming out of the camera also connects to a device called an ASI bridge, which is made by one company at this point, but soon to be made by more.

The bridge allows you to send video back to the ENG truck on a regular coaxial cable. We have tested it at distances approaching a thousand feet of regular coax.

The other systems can’t do that because they may not have the HD FireWire or their data rate is so high that you can’t support it using the ASI bridge technology.

That saves us from spending $30,000 or $40,000 a truck on encoding equipment to use a more conventional transport stream.

When you’re dealing with the number of boxes that you would require to do that over an entire broadcast group, it turns out to be a substantial savings.

What about the ruggedness of the camera? It really wasn’t designed for ENG use.

We’ve put it through some field testing and it has taken incredibly hard abuse and the camera has kept right on working. We were really very happy to experience that.

What kind of abuse?

We had a cameraman in Detroit shooting a basketball game where a charging player ran into him. The camera went flying out of his hands, up into the air, came down and hit the floor. The camera went one way, the hard drive went the other way, the microphone went another way.

He simply picked it all up, plugged it all back together and finished shooting the rest of the game. That really speaks volumes.

I know that the camera records simultaneously on HDV mini cassettes. Is that a function that you plan to use?

Yes, we will record on both so if there should be a failure anywhere, we would have a backup. That’s one of the beauties of this.

It also gives us all kinds of flexibility. The reporter can take the little HDV tape if he wants to go somewhere and screen it and play it, or the reporter could take the drive—each of our crews has two drives—and work with that.

By the way, the Detroit station where we’ve prototyped all of this stuff has never lost a story using this system and it’s virtually impossible to say that about anything else.

That’s one of the big issues in the Sony versus Panasonic debate. Some groups like Sony because reporters and producers can wander off with the discs. They can do that with the JVC. They can just walk off with the backup tape, right?

That’s exactly right. That’s exactly why we have it. One of the issues about the Panasonic product is the cost of media. It’s very high and you’re stuck with that solid-state memory. That’s it.

But what about the Sony and its disc?

The production people who were on the panel seemed to feel that the Sony disc system was very much like tape-to-tape systems and we were going in a completely nonlinear direction. Sony’s work flow is linear and it just didn’t fit with what we were doing.

The JVC camera shoots 720P, which is fine for your ABC stations, which are all 720P because that’s what they get from the network. But what about your non-ABC affiliates?

The camera internally does not record 1080 so you lose the functionality of having a simultaneous linear tape made. And you don’t enjoy any of the luxuries of the ASI bridge technology that we discussed earlier. So, we’re looking at implementing720P acquisition in our NBC stations.

So it will be 720P everywhere. I guess your thinking is that nobody is going to know the difference between 720P and 1080I?

Well, nobody will because actually 720 progressive looks better than 1080.

Well, that’s what the ABC people say.

Well it does. It has higher perceived spatial resolution then 1080.

Okay, can we talk about cost?

I can’t discuss exact pricing. We can discuss real retail pricing. This camera is less than $10,000 retail. And we’re paying an appropriate price discount that larger groups would expect.

Well, that’s a big difference, isn’t it? The Sony and Panasonic are $25,000-plus without lens. Without giving me the price, can you give me the cost relative to Sony and Panasonic in percentage terms?   

I will say to you that it is an incredibly compelling business proposition.

The day is long gone when $30,000 news cameras are going to be part of our business plan. It’s just not possible today, not only because the technology is so much better, but because nobody’s budgets in the over-the-air television business can support those kinds of investments when you multiply it by a hundred or two hundred pieces.

Let me point out something here as we talk about cost. We found that, with the smaller imager size of the JVC, the glass becomes critical. So, we are putting high quality Fujinon HD ENG lenses on these cameras. We’re not going with the less expensive lenses that the cameras are supplied with.

So you’re compensating for the smaller chip with bigger, better lenses?

Right and Fujinon is building us a lens for this chip with a 2X extender, which we feel is definitely mandatory for ENG operations. Fujinon and Canon both had a lens that would work with the smaller imagers, but none of them had 2X extenders in them, which is necessary for ENG work.

Are you aware of any other broadcast groups looking at JVC?

I have had inquiries from a number of people who have bought smaller numbers of them to experiment with. I know ABC owns a number of them. They’re using them for some long-form programming.

I have had inquiries from channels that kind of surprised me. They were interested in the product for studio operations. Incidentally, we have done a couple of long form studio shows using five of these HD cameras and they look wonderful.

What’s the rollout plan for your stations?

All of our stations will be high definition by February of 2009. As the station business plans permit, and as our stations continue to convert their news operations to high definition, we will be implementing this technology.

We have it now in Detroit. We’ll have it soon in Cleveland. Our other stations are scheduled to come on the air over the next year or so and, as they do, we will implement the technology.

I haven’t seen any metrics that would indicate an increase in viewership of a newscast when the station converts to high definition, but I personally find the difference compelling and I think people have to take notice of that.

You mentioned service as being a critical criterion in your selection process.

At least one of the traditional companies doesn’t have a very good history with servicing products and that might have been a hard sell for me to implement across the group. Our group has been very diverse forever in terms of equipment selections.

Oh, is that right? I assumed that you were Panasonic DVC Pro across the board.

Mostly, but we were not all one format. We will be with ProHD. We decided that we need to be able to take equipment and people from Cincinnati or from Detroit or from Cleveland to send them to Florida if we have a hurricane, and the equipment has to work together and the people have to know how to work that equipment.

It makes really good sense to implement the same kinds of things, the same kinds of work flows at all of our TV stations and that’s what we’ve been about for the last few years.

It is nice to be able to share hardware and recording media within your group. But by going with JVC, you won’t be able to share with other broadcasters, other ABC and NBC affiliates, most of whom are going to end up with Sony or Panasonic. Did that give you pause at all?

No, because we have ways to be compatible with other folks. In fact this camera actually has a pool input on the side for recording pool feeds which you will not find on some of those other products you just mentioned.

Let’s get back to service. You say you have had some problems with one of the other manufacturers. But you really don’t have much experience with JVC at this point. How do you know JVC is going to do the job?

JVC has gone out of its way to develop a service and support program that is really second to none I’ve seen. They have contracted with an outside supplier for overflow work. We have set up a depot service program with spare equipment. If we have a failure, we send ours back and we put the spare online. They will turn it around in 24 hours and send it back to us and we put our spare back in the box.

They have a password-protected Web site for all the equipment so that our support people can communicate with their support people. All the serial numbers and model numbers and delivery dates of all the products are all memorialized on the Web site. They’ve really taken it to the next level with this interactive Web communications.

What would you say is the biggest drawback with the JVC?

The fear of the unknown. But not for us because we know.