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City cable channel upgrades digs, toys
By Jeff Kearns
Programming doesn't look any different on the City Channel lately, and it's not supposed to. But behind the scenes, the local station (cable channel 26) is going through the most significant upgrade in its history.
Starting last week, two of the station's staffers have been working overtime to make a series of changes to the channel's quarters in the generous, air-conditioned bowels of City Hall, and have managed to keep the station on the air the whole time.
"It's kind of like a barn-raising," program director Pete Coglianese says. "You've got to do it all at once. We want to remain effective and stay on the air."
The City Channel, which airs live feeds of local government events, had been completely dismantled when it came time for the City Council's swearing-in ceremonies on Nov. 17. But Coglianese and promotions director Reinaldo Delgado still managed to carry a live feed, which required a full day of patching together a temporary fix.
Coglianese and Delgado, who make up two-thirds of the station's staff, are in the process of reconfiguring the control room to handle more modern and user-friendly equipment. It's the second major upgrade for the station this year. The first was the addition of a $25,000 digital non-linear editing bay, which is to the old analog tape-editing system what the word processor and email are to the typewriter and snail mail.
After a weeklong debugging session, Coglianese hopes to have the production capabilities back to normal for the live broadcast of the Dec. 6 City Council meeting.
The City Channel had spent the last three years saving its pennies for the upgrade by not buying any new equipment the entire time. But at the last minute, the channel got a windfall when TCI made a $155,000 payment to the city--a penalty for missing its deadline to finish rebuilding the city's cable system. The late fees from the cable company, which were received in October, paid for the entire upgrade.
In the last couple of weeks, Coglianese and Delgado have pulled out more than a mile of old cables and replaced them with about 6,000 feet of new wires. The station is also getting rid of its old 1970s-era technology, some of which has been around the station since the City Channel first went on the air in 1983.
The new editing bay is the most prominent step in the "new" direction, part of an upgrade to digital equipment that started two years ago. The new bay looks more like a desktop publishing station than a video production facility. The most important feature of the new editing setup is that staffers don't have to cue the old three-quarter-inch U-Matic video tapes and continue fast-forwarding and rewinding to all the parts of the tape they need; instead, an editor can cut and paste segments of digital video with just a few clicks of the mouse, then output the final product straight to a tape. Besides, U-Matic decks aren't even made any more, and replacement parts aren't available.
"It saves a tremendous amount of time to go digital," Coglianese says. "It allows us to increase our productivity because we can complete projects faster than we could before, and meet our deadlines more easily."
The editing software runs on an IBM MPro workstation with dual 450-megahertz processors and a 36-gigabyte arrayed drive that can store up to two hours of video. It's also connected to a CD burner, a DVD drive and a flatbed scanner for graphics.
The TCI late-fee money also paid for other improvements around the station--like a remodeled control room, just down the hall from the editing room. In addition to new paint, carpet and ceiling tiles (the old ones were collapsing under the weight of so many wires) the station also remodeled the graphics-composing station and digital audio board.
Coglianese, who has worked at the station since 1986, says the upgrades will give the station a higher-quality signal and make it more reliable. Additionally, the switch makes the City Channel compliant with the FCC's requirement that all broadcast stations start transmitting their signals digitally by 2006.
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Cupertino, California Since 1947
