Coming out of NBC Nightly News just before 6 p.m., KCRA appeared to lose horizontal sync in its studio system, causing the picture on analog receivers to see John Alston and Edie Lambert rapidly flipping left to right for around ten minutes.
Edie made reference to the problem around 6:08, about two minutes before the picture returned to normal.
At 6:19, there were some glitches again, perhaps as engineers made adjustments... during Eileen Javora's weather graphics.
Could the trouble have been in a character generator or switcher?
During one of the weather cast glitches, the KCRA logo in the lower right corner dissappeared, while the "key cut"—a "hole" being cut by the switcher in the background image—remained visible as a black outline of the logo and where the lettering went. It faded out after a few seconds, and the newscast went into a break without the usual graphics.
After the break, the newscast continued... with normal graphics. Good show, Engineering!
Highly unsusal for something like this to happen at a top-20 market station, due to the quality of equipment in place, the increased "mean time between failure" modern equipment offers and the regular maintenence that's practiced.
Problems like this are rare, since most stations have duplicate sync generators to lock all the gear in step, and larger ones like KCRA usually have multiple graphics systems along with routing switchers and physical patch bays that allow bypassing equipment in case of failure, or a quick substitution of similar units used in other parts of the building..
Some of the later glitches may have been caused by just that... trying to re-route the studio signals around the problem, or perhaps the replacement of a faulty module in the gear that had trouble.
BTDT.
Did the DTV signal also have problems?
Ted.
Edie made reference to the problem around 6:08, about two minutes before the picture returned to normal.
At 6:19, there were some glitches again, perhaps as engineers made adjustments... during Eileen Javora's weather graphics.
Could the trouble have been in a character generator or switcher?
During one of the weather cast glitches, the KCRA logo in the lower right corner dissappeared, while the "key cut"—a "hole" being cut by the switcher in the background image—remained visible as a black outline of the logo and where the lettering went. It faded out after a few seconds, and the newscast went into a break without the usual graphics.
After the break, the newscast continued... with normal graphics. Good show, Engineering!
Highly unsusal for something like this to happen at a top-20 market station, due to the quality of equipment in place, the increased "mean time between failure" modern equipment offers and the regular maintenence that's practiced.
Problems like this are rare, since most stations have duplicate sync generators to lock all the gear in step, and larger ones like KCRA usually have multiple graphics systems along with routing switchers and physical patch bays that allow bypassing equipment in case of failure, or a quick substitution of similar units used in other parts of the building..
Some of the later glitches may have been caused by just that... trying to re-route the studio signals around the problem, or perhaps the replacement of a faulty module in the gear that had trouble.
BTDT.
Did the DTV signal also have problems?
Ted.