The big story in TV station technology continues to be HD news production, even though the pace of stations launching the service has slowed noticeably over the past few months.

Hearst-Argyle Television, owner of 26 stations and manager of three others, has been more aggressive then most in taking the HD leap. It has three HD news stations on the air and a fourth almost ready to go.

In Part I of this interview with TVNEWSDAY, Hearst-Argyle’s top tech Marty Faubell shares his early experience with HD news. Next Thursday, in Part II, the discussion turns to DTV.

And edited transcript follows:

You have at least three stations that have begun producing local HD news—Sacramento, Boston and now KansasCity. Correct?

Correct. We’ll have one more going up before the end of the year.     

What station is that?

I’d rather not say, for competitive reasons, but they’re hard at work on it right now. Hopefully, it will be up by the November books.

What about the other stations? Is there any grand goal by which you would like to get all your stations HD?       

I don’t know that we have an absolute goal. We have put together a five-year plan and have identified the markets in the order in which we anticipate making the investments that will move them along. But have not internally set some fixed date by which they’ll totally be done and online.

It’s an evolving process. We’ve made a pretty decent science out of making investments in the larger stations and, through commonality, moving that equipment down to enable the smaller stations. So we’re playing the economics at this point and they’re reasonably high-priced economics.                         

But we should see the steady rollout of all your stations over the next few years?

There’s really no question about that.  

What have you learned from the first three stations?   

That it’s easier said than done. It involves everyone in the station from engineering to news to promotion and to graphics. We’ve done a full-featured implementation of studio cameras, switchers, monitoring, test and measurement and graphics.            

Is there anything in particular that caused you a lot of headaches?

It’s much easier to deal with the increase in resolution than it is to deal with the increase in aspect ratio. Most of the headaches that we’ve encountered have been in dealing with changes in aspect ratio—integrating 4:3 legacy content into the 16:9 environment.

So it’s archival material that we’re talking about here, trying to work that into the newscasts?     

Look at it this way: You’re in a television station that just went high def. Let’s just say you shoot all your material in widescreen, some of that is high def and some isn’t. Now you have an environment in which your aspect ratio is now fixed at 16:9, but the minute you take material from anywhere else outside of your television station you ask yourself, well what will that be. The preponderance is not high def and certainly not widescreen.

If the other stations within Hearst-Argyle that have moved to high def put something up on the satellite, it’s widescreen. Well that’s good. I can use that, but the rest of the stations in the group, they’re shooting 4:3. If I take a live shot from one of my other stations, how do I integrate that into my television station? Are you going to have somebody there to watch everything that comes in and make an instantaneous decision? What’s the treatment of that 4:3 source material?

The networks, the news cooperatives of the ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates, what are they going to contribute? Now you’re going to start to see some stations start to contribute material in 16:9. Will the affiliate news organizations make that material available in 4:3 and 16:9? Are they going to give you two of the same feed?                                        

I get it. And it’s a two-fold problem. The 4:3 stations have to figure out how to handle 16:9 material.          

That’s correct. If I have a 4:3 station in Omaha, Neb., and I want a live shot from WCVB in Boston because it’s a national story and Boston puts it up as 16:9, what am I going to do?          

Don’t you just have to remind everybody who’s shooting 16:9 to keep everything in the middle of the frame?

Are they going to send it out in letterbox and am I just going to take the letterbox and get rid of the sides or are they going to put it up in 4:3 so that everybody gets it? These are operational questions that today nobody has to think about, but tomorrow, the minute that you go high def, you’re in a mixed mode. Everybody in the station has to think about that and what its impact is.    

I assume that like most of the newly converted HD stations you will be shooting 16:9 SD in the field.

Yes. There are a couple of reasons for that at this point. The predominant reason is that the field acquisition equipment is all over the map in terms of quality, standards, codecs, editing. The other reason is sending material back to the station. Typically, our model of broadcasting is live news content from the field and there are two ways to get that back today, one is via microwave and the other is satellite. Neither is operationally efficient or economical in HD at this point.                        

Won’t you be upgrading your ENG microwave to HD as part of the Sprint Nextel upgrade to digital?

We are upgrading to digital microwave. But there’s a piece still missing and that is the additional expense of the encoder that will take the high def and compress it to fit on that digital microwave spectrum. That technology does exist, but it’s extremely expensive still and suffers in some cases from latency of throughput. That means, if I compress it, it might come out the other end of the spigot several seconds later. So compression equals latency and equals cost at this point.

And even if I had a compression engine to do it over the digital microwave, what will we do for satellite? Hearst-Argyle has its own satellite spectrum, which we internally refer to as Hatsat. That’s an asset we use every day. We have seven digital satellite newsgathering channels on that and we’re soon to go to 10. It would take three of those channels to do one HD.

You announced in July that you made a deal with Sony for some of its new XDCAM HD equipment, primarily for creative services.

Yes. There’s actually a couple of layers to that. The first one was for the future of news acquisition. As you know, in the past couple of years, we’ve gone to predominantly DV in either the Panasonic or the Sony flavor. The time has come for nonlinear acquisition to enable different styles of editing, different delivery models. So, we chose the Sony XDCAM for news acquisition in 16:9 SD. It also gives us the ability to migrate up to high def. In some stations, for creative services, local spot creation, we can shoot and edit and air high def with that format.

And that’s in Boston, Pittsburgh, Orlando and Sacramento.     

Yes, and we recently added West Palm Beach, our Washington news bureau and Kansas City.       

OK, but you really haven’t made a final decision on HD field acquisition.

Not as of yet. We’re evaluating that. Sony has introduced and is soon to deliver the two-thirds-inch HD imager and a compression engine in a 50 megabit flavor. So that, in our view, will go into post production and Chronicle and the like. [Editor’s note: Chronicle is WCVB Boston’s magazine show, which is now shown in HD.]

But it’s a good bet you’ll be sticking with Sony going forward if it has the product that you need when you need it.

Yes. That’s been our strategy.

Your counterpart at LIN, John Viall, told me that he is looking at low-priced HD cams that they can be had for $10,000 or less as opposed to putting in only $30,000 cameras everywhere. Does that make sense to you?             

The marketplace today is driven by the consumer side of the business. It’s been where a lot of the development is taking place. It’s the inverse from the old days where a lot of the development occurred at the high end—broadcasting and post-production—and filtered down to the consumer.

So what you see is much more innovation, much more breadth in the product offerings and certainly a much lower price point for high-def acquisition. The question really is, is a consumer or industrial camera really rugged enough and, qualitywise, good enough for professional use.

There are an awful lot of folks out there, including us, who are in the process of evaluating that. There’s probably not been a prosumer/industrial camera that we haven’t tested. We will find applications and are finding applications for those types of cameras.

The real question is will they be rugged enough to stand up to eight hours, 12 hours a day in the field, which is what we historically put them through. If they aren’t, then, even as John indicated in his interview, you might end up considering those cameras as disposable.

In the consumer sphere, the model doesn’t exist for you to take your VCR or your camera someplace to conveniently and efficiently get it fixed. It’s a disposable economy. So you’re likely to say, well, I can’t get it fixed so I’m going to throw it away. Our business isn’t predicated on that today. The question is, will our business move to that model? It may.

Where does that stand right now in terms of nonlinear editing?

We have several markets currently on the Avid NewsCuttter system and we are just about to put another station on with the Bitcentral Precis system.

Why are you going with two different systems? I thought everybody’s trying to get uniformity across their groups.

There are reasons to do that and reasons not to. We chose to Precis for Plattsburgh [N.Y.] because we felt it fit the needs of the stations more closely.

What are the other pieces to file-based news production?

One of the things is, when you walked in the door in the old days with videotape, you threw it into a tape machine and anybody could view it. Today, you walk in with nonlinear media and the question is, how do I see what’s on that disc. So Sony and others have come up with less expensive devices to take those files and let them play out on your PC. So, in effect, any PC with another Blu-ray hard drive or an XDCAM hard drive is now a viewing station. And the the minute you turn that into a viewing station, you can also turn that into a log-in station so while you’re viewing it, your software will also enable you to make a rough cut EDL [edit decision list]. So it’s efficient in passing that EDL right down to the editor.

Where do you stand with Sprint-Nextel and the digital microwave upgrade. Have you signed your agreements?

We have 17 contracts done, completed, with Sprint-Nextel. We have four contracts close to being completed as we speak. Out of the 17 contracts done, 17 orders have been placed. We have six stations currently getting revised quotes back and as we speak we have three stations underway with installs.

Are any of your stations in markets that are getting to a point where you can make the leap to digital?

Orlando is probably the closest at this point.