EDIUS now serves as the heart of the station’s entire post-production activities

Kathryn O’Leary

EDIUS in News

EDIUS now serves as the heart of the station’s entire post-production activities.

As a veteran news editor on staff at an NBC affiliate station in the central New England area, Kathryn O’Leary likes to work fast. When there’s a breaking story to tell, she doesn’t have time for technology that bogs her down or makes her wait. That’s why she’s a big fan of the Grass Valley™ EDIUS® nonlinear editing system.

When her station’s news department made the migration to nonlinear editing in the spring of 2008, they chose the latest version of EDIUS primarily because of the system’s affordability and real-time performance. The EDIUS software also integrated well with the station’s newly installed news production system.

Being a self-starter who has been around editing throughout most of her career, O’Leary volunteered to learn the system first and then teach it to other editors on staff. She spent about two weeks in training before she was editing pieces for a live newscast. In fact, the very day that the station went live with EDIUS (in 2008) there was a huge news event that occurred right next to its main building. After only two weeks of training on EDIUS, the staff was able to get the footage to air within minutes and the entire process went very smoothly.

The station literally recorded live video into its media encoder, dragged the file into EDIUS, and attached it instantly to their playout server. The station was the first—out of three in the market—to have the video on air and on the Web.

Nine months later, O’Leary ended up with her first Emmy® nomination in the category of “News Editing 24 hour limit,” where she edited several stories together as a montage. The EDIUS system’s built-in Grass Valley HQ codec and real-time effects allowed O’Leary to produce the nominated 75-second piece in less than an hour. The package included multiple layers of extensive effects, graphics, and titles, all created within EDIUS and edited without having to render the timeline.

Although EDIUS is fully capable of editing high-definition material, O’Leary is currently using it in standard-definition mode, as her station broadcasts its newscasts in 4:3 SD. This will change over time to include high-definition production.

The station is using six EDIUS systems on dual-processor Dell Latitude D630 PC laptop computers in the field and six more on Dell Precision 490 desktop computers in-house.

For the rest of the news staff, learning EDIUS was very easy and straightforward.

At the station, the EDIUS desktop workstations are tied to a shared storage repository, where all clips are ingested before editing work can begin. Of importance to new editors, EDIUS allows them to begin cutting even before the entire clip has even finished being ingested. And this footage is often converted within EDIUS to MPEG-2 for use among other sister stations via FTP file transfer.

EDIUS now serves as the heart of the station’s entire post-production activities, where clips are sent to NBC News Channel from within EDIUS, using the internal codecs to put those clips into the appropriate format.