Minnesota Public Radio to overhaul its plant for digital audio production
Originally published in Current, Aug. 23, 1995
Within weeks, the production staff at Minnesota Public Radio will move out of the St. Paul headquarters to an unused radio facility across town while their building's entire third floor gets a makeover.
They will return to digital studios and editing booths, where entire roomfuls of bulky reel-to-reel tape decks have been replaced by little desktop computers. Where a producer can mix a dozen tracks of audio without the help of a technician. And where tape editors' skills with a razor blade may quickly come to seem archaic.
MPR, one of the biggest U.S. production houses to switch to digital, and certainly the largest in public radio to do so, will spend some $1.5 million for equipment, training for about 100 staffers, remodeling and other costs, estimated Don Creighton, v.p. of technology.
The network split its shopping list between 33 terminals running D-Cart software and 27 Macintoshes running a system called Pro Tools III as well as D-Cart.
The more complex offline work will be done on the machines with Pro Tools, a networked multichannel editing system developed by Digidesign Inc., a Menlo Park, Calif., subsidiary of a video-editing pioneer, Avid Technology Inc. Pro Tools had all the capabilities MPR needed without excess doodads that could confuse users, said Creighton.
For simpler editing and for playing recordings to air, MPR will use the D-Cart system developed and sold by the Australian Broadcasting Co., Sydney. Creighton said it's a "proven technology'' that's already in use by CBC and Capital Cities/ABC in New York.
The D-Cart workstations, as well as some IBM-compatible PCs, will share audio from a big central file server that holds up to 192 hours of sound (without data compression). For emergency backup, MPR will have two mirrored D-Cart systems operating at all times. All 27 terminals will be installed by the end of September [1995], according to Creighton. D-Cart will also run on the Macintoshes, along with Pro Tools.
The system will let a number of producers start editing a live feed of a press conference even before the feed has stopped coming in.
Keystrokes counted
With its analog equipment wearing out and spending more and more time being repaired, MPR started factfinding about digital systems a year-and-a-half ago, according to Creighton. Technicians came up with lists of needed capabilities and gave about 60 vendors a request for proposals last fall. They narrowed the 25 responses down to 12 vendors and then to the six that network staffers examined and test-drove in St. Paul.
While kicking the tires, they counted how many keystrokes it would take to complete a task. "If it takes five more keystrokes, 50 times a day, it will be something you learn to hate," predicted Creighton, a computer man who came to MPR in January 1994 from Racotek, a wireless data transmission company in Twin Cities.
At first, the manufacturers of the two chosen systems were told they must come up with a way the systems could share files, but MPR concluded that the assignment was "a little bit of a stretch, perhaps,'' Creighton said, and dropped the demand. Producers will be able to move audio from one system to the other through ordinary digital inputs and outputs.
"You'd like to believe you would find [one vendor offering] everything from soup to nuts,'' said Creighton. "The reality is, you still buy this piece from here, this piece from there.''
With the new offline production equipment, plus future online digital equipment for on-air use, MPR will complete an all-digital audio chain. Reporters are already using portable digital audio tape (DAT) recorders. Creighton expects they'll eventually capture sound and edit it on portable computers in the field.
In D.C.: "disciplined'' progress
Along with MPR, another of the biggest production houses in radio, National Public Radio, has been shopping for digital equipment, too, but is in less of a rush to buy it.
With mostly up-to-date analog equipment in its new Washington quarters, NPR "can actually wait a little bit longer to see if there is another stage of development,'' explained Creighton.
Don Lockett, NPR's v.p. for audio engineering, said the network is behind its own schedule to convert, "but nobody's screaming'' so far.
NPR has signed a letter of "intent to negotiate'' with Sonic Solutions, one of the two manufacturers in the race, and is now customizing and simplifying the company's beta-stage software to bring it as close as possible to the familiar stop/play/rewind modes of tape decks, said Lockett.
"We're moving slow, but we're moving slow in a disciplined way.''
NPR is already using four Sonic Solutions workstations and has saved up funds for a $400,000 conversion of the newscast unit as the next big step into the digital domain. Eventually, staffers will have be able to edit and mix digital audio wherever they now cut tape, and perhaps wherever they have newsroom computers.
At first, a set-back
Alan Baker, a Minnesota Public Radio producer who is training eight colleagues a week on the Pro Tools system, said the biggest obstacle for many trainees is learning how to use a mouse and other doodads that aren't used by MPR's centralized computer system.
"Initially you find yourself in the position where you're a bit frustrated,'' said Baker. "You know how you want it to sound, but you don't know all the tricks to get it there.'' But after two or three months, a user is back up to speed and benefiting from other advantages of digital.
Some staffers he expected to resent the new technology have been the most enthusiastic after training, he has found, because they edit and mix a program without typing up a list of edits for a technician to follow. "They see the freedom they have to actualize their own pieces. They're no longer dependent on someone else's ears and talent.''
The downside is producers working alone won't have the technicians to offer ideas or react to them.
Dennis Hamilton, MPR's v.p., broadcast, suspects the digital systems will greatly increase productivity, but he can't predict how much. "In the hands of a skilled producer or editor ... I don't think we really know what hurdles it can jump yet.''
Digital certainly gives the creative people much more precise control over the product, letting them tweak a segment or completely redo it much more readily, Creighton said. With cut-and-paste, Baker added, a producer can easily make separate versions of a piece for different dayparts, programs or audiences.
Audio quality also will improve, of course. Material won't have to be dubbed again and again for editing, as analog tape is, so there will be no accumulations of hiss and distortion.
In addition, supplementary software lets Pro Tools users condense and expand sections of audio to fit a time slot, said Baker. Last year he used the software in his home studio to crunch segments of his national series The Composer's Voice so that they would all precisely fill 28 minutes and 30 seconds.
The system also will be able to remove the background sounds of air conditioners and electrical interference from field recordings, or add reverb to a dry recording of music.
As part of the digital transition, MPR has CPB funding for development of an interconnection system called LocalLink, which will let distant stations in its network exchange audio material with network headquarters in St. Paul.
Later news: NPR begins switching its news operation to digital editing, 1998.
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