In the post 9/11 world, the duties of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services have been substantially expanded. Today, whenever a major natural, health, or manmade emergency occurs in the United States, HHS-TV takes to the airways and the Web to keep the public and government officials informed. In fact, HHS-TV now has its own 24/7 channel slot on DISH Network.
"We like to think of ourselves as being akin to The Weather Channel," said HHS-TV chief engineer Chad Heupel. "Most of the time, people will be aware that our 24/7 emergency information channel is available to them, but they'll tune elsewhere. But when things go wrong and they need the latest health and safety information they can find, they'll tune to us."
To support this expanded mission, HHS-TV's video facilities at its Washington, DC, headquarters have been ripped out of their 1970s stupor and brought up to 21st century standards. The resulting work environment is tapeless, while most of the studio production equipment is controlled via LAN network control. This allows typical control room functions to move among workstations in the control room or anywhere there is LAN network connectivity, including over the Internet through VPN access.
"We can log into the system from anywhere, and operate most of the facility, just like we were in the control room itself," said Heupel.
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Before The Upgrade
The original HHS-TV studio with its raised, glassed-in master control, was built in the 1970s. On the good side, the engineers who designed the space took care to build soundproof double walls, install copper RF shielding in floors, ceiling, and walls, and mount the studio on a floating slab to isolate it from street vibrations. On the bad side, HHS-TV's equipment was seriously out of date.
"Our purpose was to record simple videotaped greetings from the secretary or the surgeon general, and to provide a contact point for remote TV interviews with CNN and FOX News," said Heupel. "As a result, our equipment was pretty basic."
After HHS received federal funding to upgrade its facilities -- approximately $3 million for equipment and $2-3 million for physical plant changes -- they went hunting for someone to lead the project. As fate would have it, Heupel had done a similar stone-age to space-age upgrade for FEMA, so he was a natural choice for the job.
"I transferred from FEMA to HHS in April 2004 to head a department that only had two people, and that was changing its mandate from corporate communications to emergency preparedness/response," he told Government Video. "Today, in addition to myself and another government staff member, we have five contract studio production technicians and three producers who work with us. It's a much more capable, much more responsive department."
Focus On Flexibility
Heupel had a clean slate to work with in upgrading HHS-TV. Mindful that such freedom also came with a great deal of responsibility, he did extensive research and worked closely with independent design engineer Bill Maylett from Optik Communications Group.
"My overall goal was to build a facility that was as flexible as humanly possible," he said. "Knowing that this was going to be an emergency broadcasting facility, we needed a studio/master control that could be operated by a handful of people, but that could also accommodate an expanded staff during major situations."
Heupel opted for a file-based, tapeless production environment, one based on servers, routers, and other digital technology. He also designed the facility to be decentralized, so that the production switcher, video servers, and other production systems could be accessed on a shared LAN system to allow for access from multiple workstations simultaneously from anywhere.
"In our control room we have five workstations, each of which can handle teleprompter, still store, video server record/playout, or live to air PowerPoint or Internet display," Heupel explained. "No longer are we locked into one location per function -- we can customize our control room layout to most efficiently support the production requirement of the day."
In order to create the new HHS-TV facility without disrupting the old, Heupel began by emptying the old lighting dimmer room -- requiring field lights to be set up in the studio -- and then rebuilt it as HHS-TV's new master control. "I had debated just ripping out the old master control instead," he recalled, "but I wanted to maintain operational readiness of the HHS-TV studio during the upgrade. This proved to be a good thing: We were in the middle of the project when Hurricane Katrina hit, and the old studio/master control were needed to link the secretary to CNN and FOX News."
Ready For Action
Once the new master control was ready, the studio was outfitted with six Thomson LDK 300 cameras, and the old master control was demolished and rebuilt to house three Avid edit suites and a Pro Tools finishing room. HHS-TV also installed a Grass Valley Zodiak video switcher and Concerto AV router controlled by Encore software.
"Our monitor walls are all virtual monitors using an Evertz Maestro to provide four multi-image video feeds to the master control LCD, the two Barco projectors in the main control room, and a TD monitor," he added. "We can customize our monitor wall layouts at the click of a mouse, which matches the flexibility of our control room workstations."
Video ingest and editing is done on two Avid Adrenaline systems. "We have them divided into two ingest areas," Heupel said. "Each ingest area has an Adrenaline system and is equipped to handle whatever format people might bring in, such as VHS, DVD, Beta SP, DigiBeta, DVCAM, DVCPRO, and XDCAM, which is our primary shooting format at HHS. The video is ingested at 1:1 onto the Unity Network and is edited in one of our four Avid Adrenaline suites. With the ingest stations and Avid suites, we have the ability to have six Avids working on projects at once, which gives us tremendous editing capabilities in times of emergency."
HHS-TV can receive (and send) material via its analog/digital Ku-band uplink/downlink on its rooftop, as well as its Level 3 Vyvx fiber optic link to the DISH network. "We also have dedicated two-way Level 3 Vyvx fiber optic connections between our headquarters and all of our studios within HHS, including the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, and the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda," Heupel noted. "We have a spare two-way circuit that we use for press conference feeds, or a live inbound remote which any media outlet can tap into as need be."
So far the system has yet to face a Katrina-style disaster, but HHS-TV is definitely ready for the challenges such a massive crisis will create. "We have a 21st century facility that can serve all of our many clients quickly, effectively, and reliably," Heupel said. "We've come a long way from our old 1970s vintage studio."
MORE INFO
Avid Technology avid.com
Barco barco.com
Evertz evertz.com
Grass Valley thomsongrassvalley.com
Level 3 level3.com
Nexsan nexsan.com
Omneon omneon.com
Pictron pictron.com
Sony sony.com/government
Spectra Logic spectralogic.com
SIDEBAR
HHS-TV uses Omneon Spectrum video servers for the capture, playout, and storage of video. "We started with eight playout and record channels, and have added six more playout channels to it," said Heupel. The system also includes an Avid Unity shared storage system and Pictron digital asset management software that automatically moves video between online, near-line, and long-term storage (and back again) as required.
"Everything that we ingest goes to our video library," Heupel explained. "Our Pictron DAM system then retrieves it to online storage a few hours before it is scheduled for playout."
The library is based on a Nexsan SATABeast with 23 TB of near-line storage and 16 PB of archive storage using Spectra Logic equipment. Based on Heupel's math, this works out to 360,448 hours of automatically accessible video storage. That's the same as 15,018 days or 41 years ... give or take a month or two.
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