Testimonials - Synergy 2

Ross Synergy 2 with "Squeeze & Tease" is a Shining Star at NWCTV

Tim Gaffron
Production Manager
Cable 12 Northwest Community Television
Brooklyn Park, Minnesota

Cable 12/Northwest Community Television is a non-profit operation serving the northwest suburbs of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Our mission is two-fold: to provide Public Access training and facilities to area residents, and to provide quality Local Origination programming on Cable 12 in the form of live "hyper-local" news, information and events coverage. During my 15 years here, the two entities have shared a studio production facility, which meant it had to be kept extremely simple to operate and fully format compatible for both SVHS and DVCpro. The control room was equipped with a GVG100 switcher and a technical quagmire of patching to change formats.

At the same time, our Cable 12 News operation had been growing over the past 10 years to the point where we were doing 3 live newscasts a day Monday-Friday, taking live-shots from our ENG Microwave truck and far outpacing what we could do in the control room. While we don't compete head to head on the same stories as the Twin Cities affiliates, we do live next to them on the dial and our look wasn't holding up to channel flipping or doing justice to our content.

In the Fall of 1998, when the Public Access operation made plans to move into a new wing of the building, we no longer faced having to compete for studio space and time. It also presented the opportunity to make much needed technical and capability upgrades to our control room.

Entering my second year as Production Manager, the biggest challenge I had faced was laid out in front of me. "Replace the Grass, might as well make it all digital, make it so we can do side by side live shot boxes, do Chroma Key, make sure we can get stills and OS boxes easily. And redo the Production truck at the same time." (Gotta love visionary News Directors!) No problem. Toy store, here we come. Switchers, DVE, Still Store, Conversion Gear, Console and racks, installation and knock out a wall. Should come to about this much. Problem. That list was about a DVE and a Still Store over budget. Time to get creative and do a little soul searching about our real needs and expectations. Most of our commercial and special projects editing was being done on our two non-linear systems, so our most pressing DVE need was for elements of our live news production. Our ancient Pinnacle 2120 "DVE" had pretty good still store recall capability but lacked the dual channel functions we needed. We looked at other units within our budget hoping to find an all-in-one machine, but soon found that the modern versions were great DVE's but lousy Still Stores. The opposite was true for Still Stores, but not much help in our situation.

In stepped a friendly salesman and said "Squeeze and Tease". Huh? I think that's against company policy. Ross? Yeah I've heard of them. Synergy 2? Sounds cool. OK, I asked you here to tell me about Sony, but let's look. Two demos later for my Directors and Engineer and we knew that we had a solution to our problem. Any other switcher we looked at, Grass, Echo-lab, Philips, all were going to require a separate or add-on DVE that was simply going to put us way over budget no matter how hard we bargained. Add to that the standard features and compatibility of the Ross conversion gear with our existing Leitch equipment and it seemed like a no-brainer. Still, the unique on-board conversion by input and competitive economics of the Echo-Lab made us look twice. After several agonizing debates with my staff and a few sleepless nights (this whole project was costing twice what I paid for my house) it became clear that the Synergy 2 was really the best bang for the buck, and the most standard operationally we were going to get. As for the Production Truck, the Synergy 2 was just too much and too big for our budget and space. Wish the Synergy 1 or the Grass 100 Digital Upgrade had been available then. We chose the Philips DD10 for that application.

So, in the Spring of 1999, with the bargaining (groveling) done and the boxes all delivered, we were faced with a logistical nightmare. We needed to keep our operation on the air while totally gutting the control room. Using the production truck as temporary control room only gave us a window of 9 days to get the job done before spring sports playoffs started, or wait 3 months. With a new news set coming in the back door, everybody was a little hot to get the new toys installed and operational. No problem.

Saturday-Day 1: Rip out the old equipment, console and racks;

Sunday-Day 2: install and wax new flooring;

Monday-Day 3: install new custom console, cut huge traumatic hole in same new custom console and hope control panel fits;

Tuesday-Day 4: re-rack existing equipment and new stuff and start wiring;

Wednesday-Day 5: more wiring;

Thursday-Day 6: more wiring, engineer says "Maybe we better fire that bad boy up tomorrow and make sure nothing came loose in shipping." I scoff. The way the switcher was packed it could have been dropped by military transport without a scratch. But, OK. Probably a good idea.

Friday-Day 7: Enough wiring done to provide sources for a basic switcher test. We gather around in breathless anticipation. The power switches are thrown. For a moment there are signs of life. Then, nada. Zip. Kaput. Problem.

Double check. Dive for the phone. I pace like a nervous father-to-be as the engineers confer. Long stretches of silence followed by "yup we did that" and pushing a few buttons here and there. The tone of the conversation turns to timelines and shipping details. I start trying to figure out how to tell my News Director that there'll be no shows on Monday. But wait. Ross says they'll over-night us a new control panel. Be here by Noon on Saturday. No way.

Saturday-Day 8: Well, Ross came through, the UPS driver probably never had such a warm reception, and the new panel installed and worked perfectly. Two days later we sat down and switched a basic no-frills newscast without really any training. We did buy two days of training through Ross and their trainer did an excellent job for my crew.

Over the past year and a half our respect for the Synergy 2 has grown as we've learned more of its capabilities. The custom controls have allowed us to quickly and easily get from one special effect to another during live newscasts. We've also found that the Chroma-keyer is getting far more use than ever anticipated. It's so clean that we have a couple of regular interview shows that are partially shot on green screen and utilize a still-store background for a "virtual set". The Aux Out section of the switcher has been a pleasant surprise for us also. While we compared these features on all the switchers we looked at, we really didn't appreciate the usefulness of this function at the time. Being able to route any of our sources, including a direct inter-net feed, to any other destination has really made our control room very versatile beyond our expectations, and has boosted the creativity of our graphics production.

But by far the Squeeze and Tease we bought the switcher for in the first place is the shining star. With the ability to multiple fly-key many types of key sources, a lot of unanticipated commercial production work is taking place utilizing the switcher. One of our favorites is the "Magic Carpets Genie" where the Chroma-keyed owner of a local flooring store rides a Persian rug through the shots as he makes his pitch.

The post-installation support we've received from Ross has been very good. They are always ready to answer any questions we have operationally or with technical glitches, and have patiently guided us through software upgrades on the phone.