Grass Valley Technologies Streamline KOIN News Production

KOIN-TV, the CBS affiliate serving the Portland, OR, metropolitan area, has streamlined the production of its local news with the installation of a full complement of Grass Valley live news production technologies. The highly rated station recently added K2 media server and shared storage technology to help record and deliver its news and syndicated content.

KOIN’s new eight-channel media server is comprised of a K2 SAN (Storage Area Network) and two K2 Summit production clients.  Attached to the K2 SAN are their Sony Vegas HD edit systems allowing editors to share clips and work on projects simultaneously within a highly collaborative environment. The previously installed Grass Valley Ignite automated production system will be used to control a new four-channel standalone HD K2 Summit media server to playout the scheduled lineup of local news packages on a daily basis.

Because KOIN journalists shoot with Sony XDCAM (MPEG-2) camcorders, the station is deploying 300 hours of storage at XDCAM 25 resolution, along with Grass Valley AppCenter Pro software to control the server channel operations, and a Grass Valley BaseCamp Express content management software to add and manage files and metadata, as required, in tandem with a low-resolution proxy encoder. The solution offers a drag-and-drop media manager and full archive support.

“We have always had success with the Grass Valley technology that we’ve used in the past and it has met all of our expectations,” said Rick Brown, director of technical operations at KOIN. “As a leading news station, we need to get content on the air first and with our Grass Valley systems now firmly in place, it has made our production workflows more efficient and our staff better able to handle more content faster. That’s the name of the game in news.”

In order to keep the systems up and running 24/7, KOIN has also entered into a four-year Service Level Agreement (SLA) to have Grass Valley engineering and product specialist expertise available whenever it’s needed.

“KOIN has been a pioneer in the use of IT-centric technology to streamline its local news operations and they’re supporting those efforts with this new purchase,” said Jeff Rosica, executive vice president of Grass Valley. “The strength of the K2 server line is that users can add and expand new features and functionality as the need arises.”

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