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King 5 Goes Direct to Air with Nucleo Pro

William Drescher, originally from New York, is somewhat of a legend in the After Effects world and his top-notch skills are often in high demand. Drescher was most recently recruited by the Seattle-based NBC Affiliate KING 5, which is owned by Belo Corp., one of the nation's largest media companies with 28 stations around the country. Just off the bus, KING 5 handed William the hefty assignment with an $800,000 budget. He designed, purchased, and built a new graphics plant from the ground up while KING stayed #1. In January he led a team which launched a redesign shared by seven other Belo properties. Then in April 2007, under his direction, KING 5 became the first station in the Seattle market to broadcast in true 1080i HD.

No Time to Wait, We®re Going Direct to Air

Drescher decided to buck the trend of going with status quo hardware and instead designed a unique system with flexibility and scalability. The KING 5 News and Creative Services plant is entirely Mac-based running After Effects and Apple Software along with every known plug-in. This design frees artists to ingest After Effects RAM previews directly into the news edit systems® a process that is quite unique in the industry.

KING 5 needed new station graphic looks that would marry elements for both SD and HD viewers. Right now the market is split between people who®ve already made the jump to HDTVs, as well as other viewers that are waiting until the FCC forces them to get a new TV in 2009 to see the full width of a news broadcast.

"We worked with 168 Design for the look and then internally produced 26 workable templates and other designs for everything from bump opens to lower-thirds. Once we had the final designs, we needed a speedy way to render out full 1080i and uprez the vector based broadcast graphics for the quick production of ®Day of Air® needs," said William Drescher.

For News Updates: Speed is the Ticket to Success

Drescher®s graphics room design was built for flexibility and scalability in order to meets deadlines which in a frenetic news environment can be nearly impossible. Speed is the ticket to success. While working on the immense process, William enlisted help from many resources, including former After Effects Product Manager Steve Kilisky, who whispered to him about GridIron Software Nucleo early on. KING 5 used the beta version of Nucleo and later switched to Nucleo Pro, to be able to render After Effects RAM previews and go directly to the servers with field renders with out RAM constraints. In addition Nucleo Pro®s background rendering is a crucial process for continuing to work and meet creative deadlines.

Nucleo Pro really fit into our pipeline. One of the biggest challenges we had was figuring out a way to make 1080i files work in a production environment. After Effects RAM limits gave us some challenges, but Nucleo Pro overcame them. We rely on Nucleo Pro®s speed to make critical deadlines. KING 5 along with other Belo stations KONG 6/16 and NW Cable News produce upwards of 250 news and programming elements per day. Without Nucleo Pro, we would have been forced to cut the workload by roughly a third or reduce the complexity of the market leading projects,® continued Drescher.


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