ENG

Electronic news gathering -- ENG -- interested Park Broadcasting from the moment it became available in the mid l970s. It would free TV newscasts forever from film.

Raw film stock was one of the biggest budget items in the newsroom. Another significant line-item was for chemicals and power for the station's film processor, a mammoth machine adjacent to the newsroom. On a normal day, we'd process thousands of feet of film in four runs, at roughly 11 a.m., 3 p.m., 5 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. It took about 40 minutes for the first frame of film to emerge from a run through the processor's Byzantine chemical dips and driers and baths and more driers.

ENG was what it was called in the beginning. Nobody much uses that name anymore, since it's normal industry practice today to use portable video instead of portable film. But at the time I became news director here, nobody locally was investing in ENG technology, and very few stations in the country were using ENG routinely.

WTVR was Park Broadcasting's flagship station. We had great ratings in a good market: We were a cash cow. But the company wanted to keep it that way, and it didn't spend profligately. Park Broadcasting wanted to experiment with ENG at WTVR to see how much money could be saved. If ENG worked for us, we could eliminate the costs of film and processing. The technician who ran the film processor could be freed up for other newsroom duties.

I saw ENG in a different light. It was a chance for television news to conquer one of its biggest obstacles -- time. Eliminating film processing meant we could move story deadlines closer to airtime. When an ENG photographer returned to the station, he'd be able to start editing his pictures immediately. He could have his images on the air in no time at all.

ENG pictures also looked better on TV, sharper and more "real." And somewhere in my mind was the cool factor that came with exploring a new way of doing things.

Park flew me to WSB in Atlanta, a station owned by CBS. WSB was an early adopter of ENG, and the station no longer used any film for its newscasts. The news director helpfully assigned me to a producer and a news engineer for several days to show me how it worked. I was sold on first sight.

There were a few tradeoffs. The original ENG equipment was bulky. The cameras were just as big and weighty as film cameras, and the photographer had the additional burden of a separate videorecorder and batteries. The videotape still had to be transported back to the station to be aired. But we had film photographers eager to make the transition. (Routine local use of microwave and satellite live-shots on newscasts was some years away.)

When I got back to Richmond, I outlined my enthusiasm in a memo to station manager Jack Mahoney. A few weeks later, down came the word from Park headquarters in Ithaca, New York: "Go." It took me about a week to make a list of equipment recommendations, and within days we had a new ENG camera and an editing station. Just to be showoffs, we led the news at 6 p.m. that first night with a soundbite -- on videotape -- from Richmond Congressman David Satterfield, who had spoken downtown at 5 o'clock. It never could have been aired so quickly with film.

To drive home the fact that we had it and nobody else in Virginia did, we put a super in the top left corner of every ENG story we aired: WTVR TV6 Colortape." We marketed the concept for about six months. By 1977, all three Richmond stations were using tape instead of film for newsgathering. We lost our exclusive status, but we were still pioneers. (Think back to the covered wagon on the WTVR TV station logo.)

In the 35 years since, miniaturization has wrought seeming miracles. When I go on vacation, I can take along a camera that fits into my shirt pocket and use it to record wide-screen, high-definition color video. I can use my laptop to edit the video into a coherent story, add narration and a soundtrack, and upload it to a server so friends back home can see it.

I can even send live video back home with a smart phone.

My Granny lived from a time when people rode horses to a time when man flew in rockets to the moon.

For my generation, it's been from celluloid to pixels -- at the speed of light.