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Government Video Magazine
April 2009
production
The Other Big D.C. Transition
The House production studio readies HD.
by Joy Zaccaria
Capturing all the Congressional proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives, the House Recording Studio (HRS) recently had a new facility built to eventually broadcast in high-definition. Located in the new Capitol Visitor’s Center, the new video production control room aims to make the transition as seamless as possible and to keep it all transparent to the viewing public.
Professional Products Inc. (PPI) worked with the engineers at the studio to provide design and build services.
The HRS recording and telecasts include House Floor coverage,
committee meetings, votes, State of the Union Addresses and memorial services. Anything that happens in the actual House chambers is broadcast live from this control room and then recorded and archived from here for the Library of Congress. The HRS currently sends the live signal to the Capitol closed-circuit television system and to the Capitol Hub room. The Hub room distributes the live signal to various news agencies and C-SPAN for live coverage of the House Floor hearings.
The HRS staff of 43 will output the new HD flavor when it moves in to its new facility and still offer an analog 4:3, a digital 4:3, and a digital HD 16:9 format. “We’re documenters so we’re not really spicing anything up,” said Pat Hirsch, director of the House Recording Studio. “In this facility, we will still document the Floor action in Congress. But with all the new equipment, we certainly have a lot of headroom on all these procedures that we didn’t before.”
The new House Recording Studio
CHANGE IN WASHINGTON
Something new that Hirsch is looking forward to is the ability to easily respond to requests for Floor coverage from news agencies and from members who want to put clips on their Websites.
“We now have a small server that allows us to go in and rapidly find video and output it as a file,” said Hirsch. “It will save us some time.”
The existing analog control room has been in service for over 25 years. Most of the equipment is about that old with a few new pieces of gear patched in over the years.
“With all the major networks providing HD now, live coverage from the House needs to be in HD,” said Kevin Filano, systems design engineer at PPI. About five years ago, the HRS replaced all the cameras in the House Chambers with Ikegami high-def 720p cameras.
“They were slowly moving towards the HD because they knew they would be doing this switchover eventually,” he said. “They are going to be a 720p house. That’s what
we built our system around. But the whole system is capable of 1080i.”
Filano chose four Broad Scan HD scan converters from Analog Way to allow seamless transition between live video and computer images. Filano has used Analog Way products for seven years for their high quality, easy configurability and low failure rate, he said.
One of the major functions of the HRS is to provide archival broadcast quality copy as part of the official record for both the National Archives and the Library of Congress. “Since the mid-’90s we have been archiving on DVCPRO tape,” said Hirsch. “We’re going to do that until we are eventually asked to do something different.” Between the committee hearings and floor coverage, the HRS can capture, document and archive over 50 hours of material in a day. An Omneon encoder/storage system will be used for local archiving and day-to-day operations.
The new production switcher is a Snell & Wilcox Kahuna 4-M/E switcher. For routing, there is a two-stream PESA Cheetah and BRS system, doing HD, analog, and digital audio in that system. A Clear Com digital matrix is the intercom.
Representing the free world and democracy everywhere, the voting system was a key piece of gear.
“We integrated some custom software to interface their current voting system with the new Avid Pinnacle Deko 1000 character generator,” said Filano. “That’s where we had to marry the old with the new. They wanted to keep the same looks as what was on the screen that you see on C-SPAN.”
REVISE AND EXTEND
One of the main changes was the rework of microphone and live audio from the House Floor. The original control room was located just below the House Floor and had direct connectivity to the microphones. The new control room is in the adjacent building and all connections are done via fiber.
The initial design was to have all the microphones preamped and powered prior to fiber transmission.
“We wanted to provide full control of the microphones from the control room (located in the adjacent building),” said Filano. “We have a Wheatstone D-9 audio mixer with bridge in the system. After discussions with Wheatstone, we added two Wheatstone satellite bridges as our microphone solution.” These satellites are located under the House Floor. Two satellites were installed for redundancy. This allows the audio mixer to have direct adjustment of the microphones.
One issue with the Wheatstone solution was the fiber system is only multi-mode fiber. “The Capitol building fiber infrastructure is only single-mode fiber,” said Filano. “The Wheatstone data is a proprietary protocol. We did some research and found a solution for this. The TC Communications TC3005 units did not manipulate/interpret the incoming signal. This worked out splendidly.”
In order to facilitate a smooth transition, the staff of the HRS is being trained in the new room using actual feeds from the House Floor to get the engineers accustomed to the new way of working.
The problem of switching the broadcast over from the old studio to the new one is they have to do it when the House is not in session. “First they have to bring themselves up to speed to where they’re comfortable,” said Dave Palguta, key account manager at PPI. “Once they’re ready they have to find that window when they can make that switchover without coming off air. That has been a big challenge.”
Prepared for anything, the crew at the HRS is not only ready with stocks of redundant gear, but the engineers on staff are all armed with the knowledge of how to install this gear—so there is no waiting for a repair crew if a problem arises.
“A key design element is: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, and backup components on the shelf just in case,” said Filano. “They have a very strong engineering group. They stressed learning about the day-to-day operation as well as how to get in to the nitty gritty to fix something when it breaks.”★