Hourly News Solutions...

[rniblett]

Can I just ask, what solutions people use for hourly news? We will be using RDJ for unattended playout and we will have an analogue Sky news feed which will probably come into the studio via the desk.

I need a reliable solution to interrupt the rotation at the top of the hour, play the news feed and continue with the rotation preferably as seamless as possible. Not being physically able to try it in situ at the moment my brain is having trouble getting round the problem (a common occurrence these days!)

From what I gather the slickest way with RDJ would be to use a live news stream but it looks as though we won't have this luxury - I just wondered how others are doing it, all suggestions welcome...

Rich

[Simon West]

Hi, we have been testing this solution for on the hour sky news feed   RDJ is set to play a file (mp3) that is a bed with reduced volume - this file is 70 seconds and loads at 00.59:55 the sky feed enters the desk and plays over the bed it works fine  Note * we use an AGC/Comp after desk (not on RDJ) also the sky feed is also via PC to "open" then close the feed to prevent sky's line check bleeps from airing.

We use the 60 sec news, so at 00.59:55 sec the news bed loads and plays the first 5 sec is at normal volume it then reduces over a 5 sec fade, then at 66 seconds into the bed the volume fades up to the file end.
This allowes for small time "error" of the sky feed or playout PC clock time.   hope this helps

[rniblett]

Hi Simon, thanks very much, that's really useful and sounds like it could work for us.

Can I just clarify a couple of things? We don't actually have the Sky set up yet so I don't know exactly how it works? I know we're having a dish installed so I'm presuming we will just take an audio feed from the receiver into the desk?

You mention having the Sky feed via PC? How does that work? Sorry to sound dumb but not having it set up yet I can't go in and play..

Cheers,

Rich

[Simon West]

Hi Rich,  We have a sky dish and receiver set to the sky news service. Sky broadcast a tone every couple of mins, this would be aired when the fader is open like it is when on overnight, we have a couple of ways to control it :-

1. At first we set up a timer and relay set to close the relay (make contact and let the feed through), for this to work the timer must be kept accurate!

2. We now use a PC to take the feed via line in and a bit of software to control the input to the sound card  - we have our PC's all networked using a single time clock so it remains "true time" on all PC's
The software  AutoMute is by Charlie Davy (free)  http://www.charliedavy.co.uk.    I hope this is of help.

[rniblett]

Thanks Simon, much appreciated, I can now get my head around it 

We'll give it a try

Rich