IT FIGURES THAT THE first newsroom to take the high definition plunge would be a sports newsroom.
After all, sports is the leading driver when it comes to HD adoption among consumers. Yesterday, TSN’s SportsCentre became the first Canadian newsroom of any sort to fully make the switch to HD. In fact, the sports network’s schedule is getting close to 50% HD. Over time, the entire SportsCentre production will hit its target of 100% HD.
With SportsCentre’s evening, late, overnight and morning loop editions, TSN viewers are guaranteed nine hours of SportsCentre in HD weekdays, increasing to 15 hours on weekends.
To get a handle on what TSN has accomplished in its big money conversion, Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien recently talked with Rick Chisholm, vice-president, programming and production, TSN and Allan Morris, senior vice-president, engineering and operations, CTV. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: So you guys are working your tails off to get this thing up and going.
Rick Chisholm: We’ve been working pretty hard on it. It’s been an ongoing process for us now, certainly full out, over a year… It’s on track to be launching on September 25th.
GOB: Are you allowed to say anything on what the cost of the reconstruction might be?
RC: No. We never do divulge any of that information, Greg.
GOB: Would I be wrong to say, you know, sort of a multi-million dollar rebuild, or is that too high?
RC: That’s too high.
GOB: Alright. Well, let’s get down to the sort of, the nitty gritty aspect of shooting it doing the work in the newsroom (pictured below, with hosts Jennifer hedger and Darren Dutchyshen). How much different does doing SportsCentre in HD make it for the people working there – shooting it and editing it and all that?
RC: That’s an excellent question. You can certainly ask our production staff and our operations staff who have been working many hours on training on the new equipment. Is it different? It’s a new technology. And so yeah, people have to get used to certainly new graphics systems that we’ve never been involved with… it’s basically – as I like to say to some people – like we were driving a Volkswagen and now we’re getting into a high end Cadillac.
This is sort of got everyone pumped and certainly concentrating because their area of expertise is now going to the highest level of technology in this business, and that’s very exciting. But at the same time, it’s a little bit scary for everyone also. So, did they have to do anything different? There are still pictures coming out of the screen and the pictures are a lot better, but the technology inside that you have to do different. Allan, you might want to add a little bit to that.
Allan Morris: Well, we’re putting a brand new controller, brand new cameras, brand new graphics systems… a couple of VizRT 3D units… and we’re also putting in a Leitch high definition highlight system which, to my knowledge, is the first one in the country.
GOB: One of the questions I have is working with highlights. I mean, not all of them are going to be in HD. I guess, a growing number of them are but how much of the highlights you get are high definition? How much are standard definition?
AM: Well, the HD, what we’ve got now, we’ve decided that we would probably go with three Leitch systems to be able to capture all the HD that is coming in now. I think on a consistent basis, outside of your Saturday or your Sunday particularly, with NFL, I think we did a test to the point where we were doing four highlight packages of five that would be in HD.
That’s increasing all the time and we’ve got the capacity to take on those increases. Obviously networks, and certainly regional networks out of the States – which are so important to highlight gathering in the sports business – are moving more and more into the HD. So right now, we’re basically able to do everything that’s coming in except for maybe, on the NFL Sunday, which is a huge day.
GOB: So, what percentage of the highlights, would you say are in HD now?
AM: I would say probably about 25 %.
GOB: So, you’ll just be up-converting it, I guess, to make it work with the HD SportsCentre?
AM: No, we have two highlight systems. One is a very large one put in a few years ago that can handle as many SD games that we can do. And then, the separate Leitch HD one. They will work together and both of them will feed into the HD switcher.
And, if it’s SD, it’ll go out as SD, 4-by-3. If it comes in SD 16 x 9, it’ll go out that way. If it comes in HD, it’ll go out HD. So, again, it makes a little bit more challenging for playing back of highlights because you want to get as much HD on the air. And, we’re not moving content from one system to the next. We’re running them independently and they have their own storage to be able to handle the content as it comes in.
GOB: From a consumer point of view, how will it look?
AM: I would expect that you’re going to go from HD 16-by-9 to 4 by 3. It’s a reality of life.
RC: And one of the networks that we’ve been following and getting a lot of information from is ESPN. It’s the reality of the situation – is that you’re going to get a lot of 4 by 3 standard def that we will up-convert, but we’ll still play them back in a 4 by 3 format, if that’s how they’re going to come in. So the up-convert gives us a better picture, but we’re not expanding it and blowing it up to distort it.
GOB: So you’re not going to make players stretch so they look all weird or squished
RC: Not an original 4 by 3 picture, no. We don’t need the athletes looking any bigger than they are now.
GOB: Sometimes it just makes them look shorter and wider.
RC: And I don’t need to hear from their agents.
GOB: What else have you learned from ESPN which has been HD for a little while?
RC: There are a number of different things. Certainly they gave us a good window into the world of graphics. That they were ahead of us by about two years in the graphic area, we were able to take advantage of that – with new openings and new animations and everything else. They were one of the leaders, I would say, in the use of the real-time animation systems VizRT and they had to really move that system along probably faster than it was ready to move along.
We were able to come in, in the middle of that and see what they had to do – and we were able to take advantage of a lot of the evolutionary training and pushing on that machine that it probably, ultimately, saved us two years in development.
GOB: Now, in terms of the on-air presentation, I’ve heard people talk about, how your sets are going to have to be more perfect than they were before and the make-up and hair are going to have to be more perfect than they were before. Is that true?
RC: That is true. And we’ve actually found that out already… What we did find out, which I thought was really interesting Greg, is that we looked at our TSN set – and we have been always been very proud of our TSN set because it’s an open news room look – and we didn’t think that would change very much.
Maybe a little bit of fix-up here and fix-up there. Well, when we put the HD cameras onto that set, we realized that in a newsroom environment that is part of your set, it also has people in it. And people can get messy. And their desks can get messy and they can leave their jackets around and look messy and everything else. You don’t notice that on your regular SD highlight packages, but, boy, you sure do with HD.
You realize that at that point, that our emphasis on the set was going to have to be a priority to us and it wasn’t at that time. The detail of the camera, of the HD camera, is so pristine and so perfect that we had to freshen all the aspects of our open newsroom. And to the point where even to do some construction and try and take advantage of the whole room…
We’ve moved both our sets back to the one wall to take advantage of the depth of the room and then added brand new graphics which are more vibrant, more alive around the building to make it look more open. We had to do that or we would have spent all that money on technology and people would have only talked about the mess. It’s sort of like my teenager’s room. I bought the new house, but the kids still got the bad bedroom.
GOB: So, it will retain the open newsroom look, then?
RC: Absolutely. We had to move it around and change depth around and un-cramp it a little bit. And, there will be some discipline even for the staff who can’t be as messy as some once were.
(HD) does pick up every little detail. Makeup is a good one. But our make up artists have been working in the HD in a lot of aspects also, so we’re not worried about that.
GOB: You just have to worry about the producer with the messy desk.
RC: For sure.
GOB: Now, what about HD advertisements? How is that coming along?
RC: As far as I know right now, there’s only been one company that shot an ad in HD. Well, actually two now, because Bell is also adding one. That’s not a lot of them. We’re not too worried about it right now. We’ll play it off a separate playback for now but, it’s not a big issue for us.
GOB: What sort of estimates do you have on the number of your viewers with a high definition television or high definition set up?
RC: It’s a moving target for us. We know that, especially with Christmas and everything that people are moving towards it, but we don’t have exact numbers, so we don’t give them out.
GOB: Would it be fair to say that the TSN move is kind of a pilot project for CTV as a whole, before it moves all of its regular news rooms to high definition?
RC: Everyone in television is evaluating HD every single day. But as far as the game plan and everything for CTV, quite honestly, I am just not the person to answer it. I don’t know. Getting TSN up and operating on SportsCentre is enough for me.
GOB: Will this impact the rest of your content like, “In This Corner” with Russ Anber, or “Off the Record”? Will those be moving to HD as well?
RC: I’m glad you mentioned that. Molson That’s Hockey (which will start next week) will come from the HD set, so it will be moving into HD.
Right now, that is about all that we have planned in the one-two area. The other set – the big set that we’ve built in another studio – Studio 6 – is not in an HD format as yet.
There will also probably be some one-off specials that would be able to come out of the SportsCentre environment, especially if they’re during the day. In fact, I had a meeting yesterday wondering whether the (World Junior Hockey Championships) would come out of that, but it’s too early to tell. But, we’ll take advantage of the HD set as much as we possibly can. But you have to remember, it’s a working newsroom environment every day, which takes up a lot of time and energy on the crews and the system.
GOB: And word when some of your other channels will be moved to HD, like the NHL Network?
RC: No. I don’t have any of that information.
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