News Routing as a TV News Reporter

Video Transcript

"BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk about routing. Now with any television operation, there are a lot of signals going in every which way. You have audio signals. You have video signals, and they're coming from different places and going to other places. So what you need to be able to do, especially when you come into an edit bay, is make sure the signals you want to play with, you want to edit and work with, are coming from the right place and going where you want them to. For example--and there are a lot of different kinds of routers, and the different routers all have different ways in which they operate. But they'll have similar basic principles, and those basic principles are basically: This is where it's coming from; this is where it's going to. For example, if I were working in this edit booth, I would want to route from these decks, which are play decks, to a record deck over there. So what I would do is I would tell the router by punching a series of buttons in a certain fashion take the video and take the sound, take whatever I want from this area here and send it over to the record side. Take the audio from this area or from the audio booth--the audio booth where I would record voice things and things like that--and bring that over here or possibly bring a signal from somewhere entirely different. So I would route a video signal from a computer or an audio signal go from an audio booth or maybe even from a completely different station as well. It could be something coming off of a satellite, something coming off of a computer, something coming off from a different station. So we would tell that with a router. Take the information from this place, put it over in this place, and that allows us to compile all these different signals into one final location."