It is always great to meet someone like Bill Kerner, supervising editor at ION Media Networks, who has used his skills and creativity to land a position he really loves.  “This is a dream job,” Bill beams. “To be able to work at a broadcast network level while staying in the southern Florida area with the kind of editing environment and creative collaboration we have here is really wonderful.” ION Media Networks, Inc. owns and operates the nation's largest broadcast television station group and ION Television, reaching over 94 million U.S. television households via its nationwide broadcast television, cable and satellite distribution systems. That means they need lots of promos for their broadcast schedule, and that keeps Bill busy in his Final Cut Pro edit bay.

“Even though many of our shows have aired before, we try to provide totally new promos for them,” Bill begins. “This week my team was working on original spots for episodics like 48 Hours, Who’s the Boss? and Mama’s Family among others so we can add our own flavor to their on screen look. ION Media Networks also shows a lot of films produced by RHI Entertainment, so cutting promos for these longer productions can take up almost a week.”

Bill works in a department with five other producer/editors, often referred to as “preditors”. The team works hard with three Final Cut Pro systems, along with five Avid Media Composers with Adrenaline acceleration. It’s a busy workflow, with assignments designated by Creative Director, Russell Frederickson. When he receives a project, Bill inputs the footage from DigiBeta tape into his FCP system at DV 25 resolution for offline editing. After reviewing the material, Bill prepares a one page rundown sheet and a five-minute “clip reel” for the promo in preparation for a creative story session with all the other preditors. Once finished editing at DV 25, Bill re-batch digitizes the material into an 8-bit uncompressed master.

A recent project Bill worked on involved the RHI feature On the Beach starring Armand Assante about a world faced with nuclear destruction.  “We kind of collaborate on these rundown sheets to get the benefit of second or third opinions,” Bill says. “Thanks to our EditShare shared storage system, all the preditors can add their input to the final product.” ION Media Networks has been tapeless for almost a year, having installed a 20-terabyte EditShare system last January (mirrored by another 20 TB for backup), and they are already looking forward to doubling the EditShare’s capacity. That gives each preditor access to everyone else’s cut sequences and even, when permission is given, to their source material.

This tape-free environment extends to delivery, since Bill transfers his finished product as 8-bit uncompressed files over FTP to the ION Network Operations Center’s Omneon playout servers. The ION Media Network has expanded to take on two 24/7 digital channels, ION Life, dedicated to healthy, active lifestyles and Qubo, for children’s programming. A large portion of the EditShare is allocated to programming editors who are preparing shows for these new distribution outlets “Digital technology is giving us more time to be creative,” Bill tells us. “Instead of waiting for the computer to think for us, we are thinking ahead of it for once.”