A new facility in Downtown Newark, is home to New Jersey’s NJTV public television network – and a new SSL C10 HD Plus Compact Broadcast Console.
NJTV is the non-profit affiliate of WNET, New York City’s flagship public television station. The new10,645-sq-ft Agnes Varis NJTV Studio functions as WNET’s anchor studio, home to the evening news programme NJTV News, and soon to host the production of weekly programmes.
NJTV’s relationship with WNET prompted the choice of the SSL C10 as the centrepiece of the new studio: ‘We have an SSL C10 at the main facility, WNET New York and we – myself and Mark Nixdorf, NJTV’s Lead Technical Engineer – have had great experience using it,’ says John McGowan, Director of Audio Engineering and EIC NJTV News, ‘The C10 is the best console available at the price point for doing a daily news show. It has all of the big-time features we need, like a preset mode, mix minus capabilities, automation, and DAW control.’
The primary function of the new facility is newsgathering, with four to five remote units roaming the state of New Jersey on a daily basis: ‘They travel to various locations, including university content bureaus or our studio at the Trenton Statehouse where they’ll do remote interviews,’ McGowan explains. ‘Once a news piece is complete, the crew can feed it to us ahead of time. If it is late-breaking news, we’ll send it right out on the air. In addition to the nightly NJTV News, we also do special reports.’
One of C10’s features that McGowan is exploiting is the Dialogue Automix, which he describes as ‘very beneficial for shows with a lot of guests. We did a show a few weeks ago where we had eight guests in the studio and – while Automix isn’t going to mix the show for you – it does a good job of picking out the voice that’s in the lead and amplifying it correctly without squashing everybody else. The engineer still has to do some mixing, but the Automix function saves you on up-cuts many times.’
He is also taking advantage of C10’s C-Play Audio Playout system, which incorporates a full-featured spot and music play out system into the console. ‘We use C-Play almost every day,’ states McGowan. ‘If we have a specific graphic that comes in at certain times, we can trigger C-Play from the console’s touch screen, or we can set it so that the engineer can just bring up a fader and it plays. It’s a great feature to have built into the console.’
As with many broadcast studios connecting audio gear to an SDI-based infrastructure, routing audio can sometimes present a challenge: ‘We’re an embedded facility in Newark,’ says McGowan. We’re using SSL’s SDI-Madi interface to extract audio from the SDI video signal, and having that at our fingertips is really helpful.’
He also finds comfort in SSL’s service and support. ‘Knowing that the SSL NY field office is near to us is pretty big for me,’ he says. ‘The tech support staff are great – very responsive and they really know what they’re doing.
