Solid State Logic announces that New Jersey’s public television network, NJTV, has installed an SSL C10 HD Plus Compact Broadcast Console at its new facility in downtown Newark. Located on the second floor of 2 Gateway Center, the 10,645-square-foot Agnes Varis NJTV Studio functions as WNET’s anchor studio.
The location is home to the evening news program NJTV News with Mary Alice Williams, and is scheduled to host production of weekly programs including On The Recordwith Michael Aron and Reporter’s Roundtable.
NJTV is the non-profit affiliate of WNET, New York City’s flagship public television station. In July 2011, NJTV began delivering news and documentary content to all of New Jersey as well as parts of New York, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, reaching these regions on-air as well as online.
“We have an SSL C10 at the main facility, WNET New York,” says John McGowan, Director of Audio Engineering, and EIC NJTV News. “And we—myself and Mark Nixdorf, NJTV’s Lead Technical Engineer—have had great experience using it. The C10 is the best console available at the price point for doing a daily news show. It has all of the big-time features we need, like a preset mode, mix minus capabilities, automation, and DAW control.”
The primary function of the new facility is news-gathering, with four to five remote units combing the state of New Jersey on a daily basis.
“They’ll travel to various locations, including university content bureaus or our studio at the Trenton Statehouse, where they’ll do remote interviews,” explains McGowan. “Once a news piece is complete, the crew can feed it to us ahead of time. If it is late-breaking news, we’ll send it right out on the air. In addition to the nightly NJTV News, we also do special reports like the one we recently aired when New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced his Presidential candidacy.”
One of C10’s features that McGowan is exploiting is the Dialogue Automix, which he describes as being “very beneficial for shows with a lot of guests. We did a show a few weeks ago where we had eight guests in the studio and, while Automix isn’t going to mix the show for you, it does a good job of picking out the voice that’s in the lead and amplifying it correctly without squashing everybody else. The engineer still has to do some mixing, but the Automix function saves you on up-cuts many times.”
McGowan is also taking advantage of C10’s C-Play Audio Playout system, which incorporates a full-featured spot and music play out system into the console. “We use C-Play almost every day,” states McGowan. “If we have a specific graphic that comes in at certain times, we can trigger C-Play from the console’s touch screen, or we can set it so that the engineer can just bring up a fader and it plays. It’s a great feature to have built into the console.”
McGowan says that as with many broadcast studios connecting audio gear to an SDI-based infrastructure, routing audio can sometimes present a challenge. “We’re an embedded facility in Newark,” says McGowan. “We’re using SSL’s SDI-MADI interface to extract audio from the SDI video signal, and having that at our fingertips is really helpful.
“Knowing that the SSL New York field office is near to us is pretty big for me,” he says. “Their tech support staff are great—very responsive and they really know what they’re doing, which for me is very comforting.
“At the price-point of the C10, you usually get so much less of a console, but SSL came in and knocked the ball out of the park. I don’t see any other console in its class that’s even close to C10.”
Find information about the SSL C10 HD Plus Compact Broadcast Console.
Visit NJTV at www.njtvonline.org.
