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Advice with insurance question on Broadcast Head-End Gear
Any help from the Cow-Experts out there, is greatly appreciated with my dilemma…
I run a small broadcast head-end for our church here. Everything is SD-SDI and the equipment is about 7-8 years old now. All of sudden last week we power-cycled our campus (which only happens during outages or construction which is typically less than 3 times per year) and we lost a large amount of gear. After going in run-around with various manufacturers and insurance companies I am trying to determine if I need to push the insurance company to understand half the equipment that is this old isn’t even made this way anymore. For example, our video Playback server died and the hard-drives it uses haven’t been manufactured my Hitachi since 2001. Our signal measurement gear has motherboard failures and will require replacement circuitry and recalibration. Our frame-gear components have been made in years and our camera is a studio camera that will probably cost just as much to repair as to replace…If I can even find one… The list of gear is below, but in a nutshell I am wondering. Should I use the opportunity to start replacing this gear with HD gear, should I try and have it repaired (for those things that even can be), or should I just let the insurance company say it needs to replaced with the same item (which none exist…)
The equipment that is dead (and all are circuit-board failures, none are power-supply issues and I have multimeter tested all power supplies to be sure it wasn’t that simple).
6 Various Ross Frame Gear Cards (SDI-Component, Compenent-SDI(RC), etc..)
1 Tektronix WVR-611A Waveform Rasterizer
1 Tektronix SOG600 Sync Pulse Generator
1 Ross Synergy 2 Switcher (Chassis only)
1 JVC GY-DV550U Camera and RM-P210 CCUThanks for any input, I really appreciate it.
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4 Replies
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Josh –
At the risk of not telling the insurance company everything – not a lie – I would keep some of this information to myself. The insurance company knows nothing about broadcast equipment, and to them, if it’s dead, it’s dead, and needs replacement with whatever will do the job; and that generally means the technology NOW available. They can’t replace what’s not being sold anymore.
My opinion on the HD side is to remain SD, at least for now. I had worked at a broadcast station for the last 14 years, until a recent layoff, and we had no plans in place to acquire footage in HD. All that’s being done is that the signal is being up-rezzed to make it the 16:9 aspect ratio, and it still looks as bad as ever; we acquire in DV, which to me is barely broadcast quality.
If a large broadcast organization can get away with this, I think you can, and sleep at night. The issues HD raises are many: your graphics and per frame of video size are going to go from about 1.2mb per frame to anywhere from 6 to 7mb per frame. Storage will suddenly become an issue, as well as throughput. Right now HD equipment, especially on the transmission end, is at its’ highest price. I’d go for SD and wait for the prices to drop. They’re already doing so in the camera market, and the features are getting better. Good luck!
I think you should get other opinions on this, though; there may be someone to weigh in who knows more on the engineering side than I do.
Joe Bourke
B/S Exhibits & Multimedia -
They’ll just depreciate the gear, cut you a check and you’ll be going shopping for new but less gear.
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Thanks Joe. Your input is really appreciated. Thanks very much.
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grinner,
sadly yes, its true… thanks for the reply.
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