Industry Tours: CBC

Jeff Tilton CCES 96 Delegate

One of the industry tours off-ered at CCES 96 in Waterloo was a tour of the new CBC building in Toronto. Although the CBC is still in a transition period and not all operations are running out of this building, the tour was still very interesting. After a long and EXTREMELY COLD ride on the yellow school bus from Waterloo to Toronto we arrived at the ultramodern CBC broadcast building.

The first thing that jumps out at you is the size of the building. This ten story building spans an entire city block and if condensed down to a standard footprint would be 60 stories tall! The architectural wonder of the building is the large atrium hollowed out in its center. After a short video on the design of the building we met one of CBC's broadcast engineers and started our tour. Our first stop was the video control booth for the Rita McNeal show. It's quite scary to see Rita over 50 TV monitors at the same time!

We continued our tour through various audio mixing rooms and editing booths before arriving on the set of a little known CBC sitcom about doctors. I don't have a clue what the name of the show was, and this part was quite boring, but I pretended to be interested nonetheless. After walking through the sets of several shows I had never heard of before we arrived in the broadcast control room. Because the transition to the new building was not complete, all of the equipment was only running in simulation mode.

The CBC system is unique in that all signals inside the building are digital. The digital routing system is the most advanced in the world and allows an operator to call up a signal from any source in the building and then reroute it to any output using only one coaxial cable. This system is comparable to the system in their old building which required 14 coaxial cables to do the same job. In conjunction with the routing system all recording (both video and audio) is done exclusively in the digital domain. Mixing, duplication, and editing are all digital which allows for many more copies to be made with little or no degradation in quality. Prior to the digital implementation, the CBC was limited to making under 20 copies of their programs before quality became an issue.

The digital playback and mastering system is the largest in the world with over 200 betamax digital playback/recording units. The nearest competitor is Direc-TV with 190 units. The CBC's only concern with the new betamax units is head life. Currently they are able to run each head for 3000 hours before replacement is necessary at a cost of about $10,000. This compares with the old analogue betamax units which could be run for upwards of 8000 hours and had a replacement cost of about $2000. Despite the excess cost of the digital units, the Engineer that I spoke with was adamant that the cost was fully justified by improvement in quality and ease of use. After our visit to the broadcast control booth we continued along visiting the sets of The National, Newsworld and several other (boring?) shows before boarding our frozen bus and heading back to our frozen hotel.

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