A Brief History Lesson

With the announcement of digital broadcast television, and its impact on both broadcasters as well as computer manufacturers, the big talk today is about convergence, that is, how computers will become more like televisions and how televisions will be more interactive, like computers.

Well, this article isn’t about that. Rather, I’d like to prattle on about how computer technology has impacted the way television is created and presented each and every day, especially within the context of news operations at a local television station.

Back in the dark ages of television production (circa 1980-1990) the sort of equipment that a station bought to create their news product (character generators, still-stores, paint systems, and the like...) were bought from vendors who made so-called “black-boxes” that were created specially for that one specific purpose. That is, the paint system was built just to be used for electronic paint; no other use could be made of it. The same was true for the other pieces of the picture as well; everything stood on its own and nothing talked to anything else.

The benefit of this closed system architecture is that the equipment did that job faster and better than anything else out there. The bad part was that the buyers were at the mercy of the vendor when it came to upgrades, or for asking for improvements in the product. Let’s say you had a need to color-correct an image in a paint system. If that tool wasn’t present in the current version of the software, you’d have to beg the manufacturer to please, please include it in a future revision. They would either listen to you, or not, depending on their corporate mood. What were you going to do about it anyway, buy someone else’s software to run on their really expensive box?

The other problem inherent with this set-up was getting material from one machine to another without losing quality. When you talked about connecting devices to one another back then you were mostly talking about getting the video output of one into the video input of another. What this amounted to, in real life, was a pathway between machines that degraded the images, making them fuzzy, blurry, and downright ugly. What was the point of creating crisp, clean digital graphics on an expensive paint system if the pathway to the still-store was a crummy analog line, prone to signal loss and distortion? It’s not like you could take the files on one machine and somehow get them to another, with no loss of data.

Spring Forward, Fall Back

All of this has changed with the advent of the personal computer. These desktop machines have become powerful enough to create, modify, and display digital graphics for television stations .

There are a tremendous number of benefits that stem from this technology. First and foremost, you can buy the software that works best for you. If a software manufacturer doesn’t have the feature set you need for your job, buy from another. Heck, use every piece of software in the world, if that makes your life easier. It’s not like you’re working on a closed box that can’t run other people’s software.

Another benefit is networking. Ah, the joy of being able to throw any image from one workstation to another. The bliss of being able to use the exact same logo in the still-store, paint system, and character generator. The freedom this system allows you is so great that even the black-box manufacturers are starting to accept common (TCP/IP) networking standards, finally allowing you to share graphics among all of the pieces of the production puzzle.

As more and more convergence happens in the control rooms, we find dedicated devices like still-stores being replaced by distributed networks of cheap, and yet powerful desktop workstations using standard, off-the-shelf hardware and disk drives, each having access to any graphic in the system. Adding the right search facilities (that’d be a database...) and some way to display those images (that’s be a frame buffer...). and you have a fast, powerful flexible system.

When I do a television station’s graphics package, one of the first things that I askthem is what sort of equipment they’re using to get their product on the air. This is important information for me to know, because the presentation of the material I create is very dependant on the level of technology at the station. For example, a news package that includes transparent bugs (usually a station logo...), over-the-shoulder boxes that involve floaters (cut-outs that “float” in space, overlapping the box...), and keyable franchise opens (the open to such news segments as “HeathWatch”...) won’t work at a station that plays their animations off of 3/4 inch tape, or has a switcher that won’t do a linear luminance key, or has a character generator that won’t accept files from another graphics system.

As someone smarter than me once said, “Design isn’t about how something looks, it’s about how it works.” All of these changes portend a time when everything works better and that makes my stuff look better.