CARLTON WESTCOUNTRY TV INSTALL QUANTEL SYSTEM

CARLTON WESTCOUNTRY TV are updating their Plymouth, UK, news and sports production facilities as part of a planned overhaul of all the station’s facilities.
The new system is based around the same Quantel server technology that is successfully powering digital news operations large and small around the world, but configured to suit the needs of a regional operation with a large news and sports output, and a 4-way opt out for purely local segments.
At the heart of the system is a 12 port Quantel Clipbox Power server, with all material held in this single central store. Three of the ports support Quantel embedded editing seats, allowing the video editors to work directly with full resolution material on the server.
Westcountry and HTV Controller of Operations and Engineering, Mark Chaplin, said: “We knew we would need a central server with embedded editing so that we would not get bogged down with the heavy asset management and tracking overhead that distributed storage systems require. It quickly became obvious that the Quantel Clipbox solution was the only serious choice. Carlton Central, our sister company in the Midlands, had recently put in a Quantel server based system to support its own news operation, and while their set-up is different from the one we have chosen, the fact that Carlton Central were very happy with their Quantel system helped us to move forward with confidence.”
The Clipbox Power is configured to store 50 hours of MPEG2 video. Raw footage is ingested via an Ibis Clipload application, with a parallel feed to a Browse server. The Browse server is also integrated with the Clipbox Power so that changes made can be instantly mirrored.
The browse server supports 25 Autocue Wincue browse viewers on the journalists’ desktops, and five Ibis Cliptrim applications, allowing editing decisions to be made from some of the journalist workstations in conjunction with their Autocue Qnews system. All shot selections and edits are immediately replicated in the Clipbox Power server, ready for air or further craft editing and refining via the three Quantel embedded editing seats.
Westcountry have built an extra level of redundancy into the system by using a Quantel Clipbox Studio server as a cache for finished work. This is a straightforward 4 port, 3 hours’ storage device which sits directly downstream of the Clipbox Power, configured with three ports playing out to air under the control of Qnews. (CD)