Meeting Topic: Tour of 5.1 Studios at the CBC Broadcast Centre
Speaker Name: Don Dickson, Juri Nechaevski and Brett Manion, CBC
Other business or activities at the meeting:
Prior to the social part of the evening, the nominations for the executive committee were announced. A vote was held confirming the nominees. The leads on the executive committee are:
Chair — Jeff Bamford
Vice-Chair — Sy Potma (pending approval from the VP -- Eastern Region)
Secretary — Bob Breen
Membership — Jim Cox
Treasurer — Paul Reibling
Bulletin Editor — Earl McCluskie
Promotion — Keith Gordon
Meeting Location: CBC Broadcast Centre, Front Street, Toronto, ON
Due to the size of the meeting, everyone was divided into three groups, which each group cycling through various upgraded control rooms.
The CBC's first upgrade was to a mobile truck, using the Premiere System. After which, Room 42 was upgraded, this is a production control room. All of the technology upgrades has been considered as part of one larger upgrade, there is heavy use of fibre to allow for direct connectivity between various parts of the building.
One interesting point that was made is that training is a concern. The upgrades present two realities: there are changes in how the work is done, e.g. patching via a cable is no longer as important as routing via a switcher. Secondly, the size of the work force at the CBC presents a challenge in of itself.
Studio 52 is CBC's first High-Definition new control room, which is the control room for their evening news program, "The National". Although not yet broadcast in high-definition, the new control room is fully equipped for 5.1 sound.
Also visited during the tour was Room 45, which is the room where the popular comedy program "The Air Farce" is mixed. This program is produced in 5.1, but is only transmitted as a two-channel encoded surround.
Finally, a large control room has been upgraded to the "Imax" surround sound standard to allow for mixing of large format movies, a short clip was viewed on this system.
During the question and answer period, there was considerable discussion on the use of metatags and how what is ultimately transmitted on the network may not entirely represent what was heard in the control room.
