Wally Wawro Audio Production Director, WFAA-TV, Dallas, TX
by Jerry Vigil
This month's interview exits the radio business altogether to take a glimpse at the world of TV audio production. But we don't stop at the average television station. Instead, we pay a visit to ABC affiliate WFAA-TV Channel 8 in Dallas, Texas where Wally Wawro heads up one of the most progressive audio production departments in the American television industry.
R.A.P.: When did you get your first taste for the production business?
Wally: I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago. It was around 1960 when my dad brought home a tape recorder, and that was the beginning of the end, so to speak. He had always been interested in music and had a big record collection. He built his own hi-fi system out of kits and his speaker system out of plywood and other raw components, so I was always exposed to music and audio. In fact, I have a picture of myself at 3 years old, and my mother tells me the only way I would sit still for the photographer was to be given something to hold -- it happened to be a 78 rpm record.
When I got into high school, I started recording things on location -- the school band, the school choir, everybody and his uncle's rock-n-roll band in their garage -- and just always had an interest in it. I do not have any great engineering background, but the knobs and dials aspect of it all really interested me.
I never really did anything in terms of the radio business until my junior year of college. I transferred from the Chicago area to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. At the time, it was one of the premier schools for people interested in the communications media. There was a student radio station which was carrier current [coverage basically limited to the school building], and the university also owned a full-power FM, WSIU, and a full-power television station, WSIU-TV channel 8. Both were PBS and PR type of operations, and the students basically ran them with faculty guidance.
My first real exposure to what we think of as production came when I was volunteering at the student-run, carrier current station, WIDB. The station was programmed with a top-40 format, and we were all just flying by the seat of our pants. We did our own jingles. I think they were Pepper Tanner a cappella sings, and somehow we matched them up with TM jingle beds so we could have jingles. Everything was done sort of, how shall we say, clandestinely. It was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.
R.A.P.: What happened after college?
Wally: I graduated from college in '73 and proceeded on to that wonderful world called small market radio. I worked in Columbus, Indiana at WCSI-AM/FM. Then an entrepreneur came into town to put in a second FM station, and the call letters of that station were, of all things, WWWY. I was the original Program Director/Operations Manager. I did everything, and I did that for a year. I learned a lot about myself, mainly that management was not the way I wanted to go and that I really, really liked production a whole lot more than going out and doing basketball games and things like that.
From there I moved on to another small market, a station in Danville, Illinois where Dick Van Dyke got his start. That station was WITY. We were a top-40 AM station on 980, just down the dial from WLS which boomed into Danville; but we held our own locally and it was fun. I was the Program Director, once again. I also did the bulk of the production, but we had nothing in terms of production facilities. It was your basic couple of full-track machines, a 6-pot board, and a cart machine. Somehow we managed to crank the work out and had a lot of fun doing it. After these stints in the small markets, I moved on to Texas.
R.A.P.: Texas brought you several years experience with TM Productions. How did that come about and what did you do at TM?
Wally: I had been enamored by the jingle business ever since college. That was where I heard my first jingle demo. I got to talking with somebody one day about what it would be like to work in Dallas for one of the jingle firms. That was sort of a goal for me. Every so often, the trade papers would have an ad from PAMS or TM looking for help. A couple of times I got brave enough to send something down. It was March of 1977 when I got a call from Ken Justiss who was the Operations Manager at TM Productions. The call was basically, "We'd like to interview you for a position we have open. Could you be here on Monday? We'll arrange your flight and everything." Well, you don't say no to that, so I came up and interviewed. I did not get the job, but it was neat coming to Dallas, coming to see this mecca that TM was at the time, and looking at the studios and getting a taste of just how they worked all this wonderful magic we all heard on their jingle demos.
A couple of weeks later, I got a call from a gentleman in their programming division by the name of Don Hagen, and he said, "I have a job for you." I left Danville and moved to Dallas, and I have been here going on sixteen years.
I started out working for TM's programming division, and I was essentially assembling automation tapes. About a year later there was an opening in the production division for a producer, and I was able to move into that position. The 70s were the heyday of TM, especially the mid to late 70s, and that's when they were selling gobs of jingle packages, things like The Winning Score and The Alternative. They also had their production libraries which were just about everywhere -- Masterplan, The Producer, The Production Source. I was primarily responsible for working on material for all three libraries but mostly for Masterplan and The Production Source, and this would be anything from editing music, assembling tapes made from masters, and writing copy to go along with this. It was a lot of fun.
I also got involved in doing the demos for the jingle packages, and again, this was during a 60s and 70s mind set where everybody was really anxious to hear what that next jingle package was.
TM also put out three compilation albums. The most famous one was Tomorrow Radio which was done for the '76 or '77 R&R Convention in Dallas. Then they did one called Station Image, and the third one was called Tomorrow Media. I contributed quite a bit to Tomorrow Media in terms of copywriting and production, especially on the sales portion of the disk which highlighted the programming formats and jingle demos and such. I couldn't even begin to remember the names of the packages or the jingle demos that I was involved in, but let it suffice to say if it came out between '78 and '81, I probably did the demo, and that included writing the thing, taking the jingles that had been produced, and figuring out how they would all fit so someone would buy them.
R.A.P.: What happened after TM?
Wally: I left TM in 1981. They had a housecleaning and were going off in a different direction. The company had been bought and sold. Whatever the reasons, they let a number of people go. I free-lanced for quite a while in the Dallas area and sort of got the reputation, at least locally, of being Mr. Demo. I did demos for just about every local production firm with one exception, and that was JAM. I have done things for Century 21 and Otis Connor. The Music of Your Life format was coming into its own then, so I did a fair amount of work for Jim West who was in charge of syndicating that. Satellite Music Network was just getting started at the time and I did a lot of demos for them. It went on and on, and for several years I was doing demos. At one time I had written and produced demos for four competing production libraries that were all coming out of Dallas. I was like "Dial A Demo." I can't describe it any other way.
R.A.P.: How did you wind up at WFAA-TV?
Wally: While I was at TM, WFAA did a big music package with us, and they later got into the habit of coming over to TM to record their announcer copy and such. They were using Larry Dixon at the time who is now at KPLX. So, a producer from Channel 8 would come over, Larry would come over for the announcer part, and I would usually engineer and mix the session. I got to know the Promotion Manager at Channel 8 fairly well, Lee Minard. Then, in the midst of my freelance career, I got a call from Lee asking if I would be interested in producing radio commercials for the station on a freelance basis. It was guaranteed money every week for about twelve or thirteen weeks, so I said, "Sure."
I came to Channel 8 basically to do that. Lee had an assistant at the time by the name of Ed Aaronson. Ed came up to me one day and said, "How would you like to go on full time?" I accepted and officially joined WFAA in November of 1981 and have been here ever since.
We started off with a very small setup. We had a 12-input Ward Beck console, an Ampex 4-track, and a couple of 2-tracks. We've grown it over the years, but it's been a slow process. One of the first things we bought was a Studer 8-track machine. That machine has been a workhorse. For the longest time, we kept the little 12-input board and ran everything through that. Over the ten years or so that I worked on that equipment, I dare say we produced a fair amount of interesting stuff.
R.A.P.: Did you maintain much freelance work after taking the full-time position with WFAA?
Wally: Yes, I continued to do a fair amount of freelance work. Satellite Music Network became a fairly steady client. I was doing their programming demos to help them sell their format and a number of other little projects as they came up.
I had a relationship for about eighteen months with a radio station up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, KRAV. I was doing all their contest promos in 1986 and 1987. I worked with a Canadian firm, Airforce Broadcast Services, doing various things for them. One of the more interesting projects I've had - the venture failed but it was kind of fun - was with a group that was going to syndicate a radio format called the Kid's Choice Broadcasting Network. It was essentially kiddie radio, designed for kids ages two through eleven. There was a station in Little Rock, Arkansas that had experimented with the format and had some success. They won a Peabody Award, and the principals behind this station thought there was potential for syndication. They came to somebody I know here in Dallas, and I got hooked up with them through him. We went ahead and produced sales material and a demonstration tape, and they took it from there. Eventually, they found there was just no market for it, but it was a novel idea.
In the rest of my freelance activities, there's one I would think many of your readers would want to do -- a beauty pageant. I got hooked up with a couple of producers out of El Paso, Texas who held the franchise to produce the Miss Texas USA pageant which had a state-wide TV audience. I sort of became their audio guru for the production. I mixed the show from the TV truck, did all the pre-production ahead of time, and worked on all the music production. I still continue to do it. It happens once or twice a year. I get to go down to San Antonio or El Paso or wherever they are having their show and spend five or six days in the TV truck. It's wonderful fun and everybody says, "Gee whiz, what a great job," and I say, "After you've seen one girl in a bathing suit, you've seen them all. Thank you."
R.A.P.: What is your title at WFAA, and what are your responsibilities?
Wally: My title is TV Audio Production Director, and I work in conjunction, primarily, with the promotion department. I handle all the audio production needs of the TV station. I do not mix newscasts, but anything else in the way of audio, I take care of. I do a very limited amount of voice work. "Starts Friday at a theater near you" and "Available at K-Mart" are probably my two most famous lines around here. Fortunately, we have a couple of very good announcers who are on contract to us and handle just about all the other announcing needs. I am responsible for coordinating the sessions, getting the copy from the writers and producers who put these things together on the video end, getting the sound tracks produced, and making sure the producers have the material when they go into their video sessions. I also produce all the radio spots for the station. That is an interesting area in itself because we buy advertising on the radio primarily in sweeps, and we will buy ten to twelve stations deep in the market. That will involve over three separate schedules because we will have schedules to promote different aspects of our programming. For example, we'll have a schedule that promotes our local news and says what's on the Oprah Winfrey show. Another one will promote our local news and say what's on Entertainment Tonight. Then the other one will probably be our local news and what the ABC TV network has on for the evening. So there is a fair amount of tape jockeying going around during sweeps time which for TV is November, February, May, and July. It gets pretty hectic around here.
On top of all that, the TV station also supports a radio network called the Spirit of Texas Radio Network. It is fourteen radio stations in the ADI that re-broadcast our six o'clock newscast every evening. We give them the news, and in exchange, they run commercial advertising for us. That network requires spots to be fed to them, and we do probably 26 to 30 reels a year just going to the network alone. There can be as many as ten spots on a reel or as few as two or three. It just depends on what we have to promote and what we need from them.
There is a lot of production coming out of here, perhaps not as much as a major market radio station, but we still come off with quite a bit.
R.A.P.: Are you involved in the production of the TV commercials for WFAA's clients?
Wally: No. WFAA is basically out of the commercial advertising production business. TV stations in the bigger markets put their resources towards news. For network affiliates, in the large markets, news is the primary product.
R.A.P.: So is it mainly the independents that do a lot more of the commercial production?
Wally: Yes. That would be correct. And in the bigger markets you have advertising agencies who are more comfortable going to facilities that are dedicated to doing commercials -- post production houses and such. So, that idea of producing TV commercials in-house, for the large market TV station, is pretty much a dwindling thing. Of course, as you get into the medium and smaller markets, in-house commercial production becomes very much a way of life and an important revenue source for them.
R.A.P.: You did a lot of production at the radio stations you were at. Outside of the obvious video aspects, what differences do you find between producing audio for TV versus producing for radio?
Wally: It's amazing how things are similar. You are working with copy, hopefully good copy. You usually have the requirement of music and some kind of effects, be they sound effects or whatever. I think the big difference is in terms of the talent. In radio, you often have more voice talent available in-house, and many times, the voice talent is also doing their own production. In TV, at least in my situation, 99% of the time I am producing with an outside voice. Of course, that gives you an opportunity to be able to direct the talent, to coax the read out of him or her the way you hear it. In radio, you have a few more tools to work with. Perhaps you've got a little bit more in the way of a budget to get better talent or maybe do something a little more customized in the way of music or effects or something along those lines. There are similarities; there are some differences. I cut and paste spots like everybody else. I'll find a bed on a music library, slap the announcer against it, and let it rip. Then there are things that get rather involved when you begin to work with natural sound recorded out in the field by a camera crew. We also do a fair amount of film work here, and I spend a fair amount of time out in the field on film shoots gathering audio for that. Your horizons expand in TV, but I feel the basics are pretty much the same.
R.A.P.: How has TV audio production advanced over the past twenty years?
Wally: It's making a very slow advance, and it's being driven, I think, by the consumer because, son of a gun, now you can go to your local, large appliance store and not only buy a stereo TV but a laser disk system, too. You have the opportunity to set the thing up to give you surround sound similar to what you have in the movie theaters. Thank goodness for the consumer. They are basically forcing the television business to get out of the dark ages in terms of audio. TV is video driven and there is no way around that. For example, what my company spends in the way of digital video processing equipment would astound anybody out there. We have got all the bells, all the whistles, all the toys. The people at ABC look at us and say, "You've got THAT?!" And we do. That's because manipulating the image has become so important. Graphics have become an incredibly important thing. Twenty years ago you didn't have field video tape. Twenty years ago it was just being invented. You had very basic character generation where they could perhaps put somebody's name across the screen electronically, if they were lucky. Usually, it was an art card that was dissolved into the picture from another camera.
The advances made in the last twenty years have been mostly in video, but thankfully, the FCC in 1986 said, "Okay. This is the TV stereo standard. This is the way it is going to be." They didn't goof it up like they did with AM, and low and behold, stereo sets came out on the market. That has started the evolution and has forced the TV stations into making changes. They're thinking, "My goodness. Stereo is here, and if the network is feeding it and advertising that this program is in stereo, darn it, we'd better make sure we can get it on the air in stereo." For a TV station, though, it is a long process. Number one, the capital equipment requirements are quite expensive. Number two, just the internal complexities of things make it difficult. I mean, you're not only dealing with audio wiring but you've got a lot of video wiring that has to follow along. The engineering requirements are much, much greater. No one that I know of in this entire industry, especially with the way it has evolved here in the 1990s, can just go out and drop a bunch of money on a brand new master control switcher that will pass stereo, a brand new studio to transmitter link that will pass stereo, and a brand new transmitter that will handle it all.
I am fortunate to work for a company that realizes that we can't do it all at once but at least gives us the opportunity to get started. We were not the first in the market with stereo, but now you can come to Dallas and watch the ABC network in stereo and hear just about all the commercials we play locally and all the promotions that are generated locally in stereo. We've had the system now for about three years. Eventually, we will be able to send some kind of stereo out on our local newscasts. I'm not saying that we'll do the news in stereo, but I'm saying at least we'll be able to then take our regular on-the-air controllers and integrate them fully for stereo.
Right now, we're looking at audio consoles for our control rooms. The stock console is not going to cut it for our requirements because we do a lot of news. We have to not only generate the audio that goes on the air, but we also have to have the sub-mixes and the mix-minus feeds and things like that that have to go to talent out in the field for cuing and so on and so forth. That requires an infinitely more complicated system than just what you'd normally find in a production room in radio. Often times, if you buy a stock product, you are going to wind up customizing it. Sometimes you have the luxury of being able to go to the manufacturer and say, "This is kind of what we've got in mind. Can you help us reach this goal?" We're fortunate in we can do that and that's what we're doing. So down the road a piece, 1994, we will have both of our main audio control rooms fully equipped for stereo with extremely state-of-the-art equipment. It will be highly computerized, and it will be wonderful.
The audio operator's job is going to become much easier and a lot less hectic than it is now. On the production aspect of it, we've built a stereo audio production facility here that is dedicated to doing production. I worked on a 12-input board for ten years, and now I've got a 40-input board. Well, that's a big improvement, but we went about it in a very slow, methodical manner and made sure that what we did was right for us in terms of equipping ourselves for the future of sound.
R.A.P.: In a recent conversation, you explained that you were looking at various digital workstations to purchase. Have you made up your mind on one?
Wally: We've pretty much made our decision. Again, one of the nice things about working for Channel 8 is that we've got a lot of people that are very perceptive, very technology driven. One such person is our systems engineer, Bob Turner. This man is light years ahead of everybody. He sees trends developing, jumps on them, learns all he can, and shares it with us. He's been extremely helpful in helping me realize a really solid audio for video room. We will be acquiring, by the end of the year, a digital audio workstation, the Solid State Logic Screen Sound. It's a very high end system. The price tag is six figures, but the thing that it does so well is that it is a very, very user friendly interface between audio and video. Instead of having knobs and buttons and dials, or a Macintosh computer, it is basically an electronic pen and an electronic pallet. You control all your audio from a video screen in front of you. There are similar systems that TV stations use for graphics work called Paintbox and Picturebox, and they happen to come from a sister company of Solid State Logic. SSL has adapted that technology for audio and has made it extremely user friendly. You've got your basic eight channels and eight reserve channels in the system, and you have all your materials stored on hard disk to be called up into the system as you need it. It will have magneto optical drives for external storage. It offers a lot more flexibility, and I really feel it's going to save me an awful lot of time.
R.A.P.: Would you say WFAA is a rare case in terms of the amount of money a TV station invests in an audio for video room?
Wally: Extremely.
R.A.P.: Do you expect this kind of commitment to become more widespread in television?
Wally: Audio for video again has gotten its big push because of the legislation selecting a TV stereo standard, and I think it's a little more consumer driven than a lot of people will admit. I think the audience is deriving great pleasure from the fact that they can now have this theater ambiance at home with the right kind of equipment. That forces the industry to do things.
A lot of TV stations go outside for production requirements, both video and audio. Even the bigger stations do not do a whole lot of work inside their facility, particularly when it comes to promoting the TV station. Our competitors here in Dallas do not have anywhere near the kind of audio facilities we have, but why do we have them? I think the reasons why are because, number one, we have the quality of people here to have such facilities in-house, and number two, in the long run, it is a whole lot cheaper to do it this way. We spent a lot of money updating my room, quite a bit of money, but the bottom line is that we can do it all here. About the only thing we don't do in here is music, and that's just because that's not my direction and not the way we want to go with it. But, we can handle the audio needs for our television station, and we can produce our own radio commercials. That saves us an incredible amount of money over the years.
More and more stations are coming into it. WSB in Atlanta is a good example. They have a small room with a Dyaxis in it and are using it to generate their own audio. Our sister station in Houston, KHOU, also has a Dyaxis. However, they don't have a full time producer assigned to the job like I am. Some of them just work with freelance people. But slowly, in the bigger markets, it is starting to creep in. One station realized that there is a little bit of an advantage to be able to have your audio production in-house, to be able to do your radio in-house, to be able to have the facility to come up with that unique or different audio track for that film promo or that news promo or that show promo. It started a trend, but it's going to happen very slowly.
R.A.P.: What opportunities do you see for radio producers to get into television audio production?
Wally: I see a lot of opportunity for the guys that are out in the medium and the smaller markets because there are stations there that you know and are familiar with. As I mentioned, in the medium and the smaller markets, they not only have promotion to deal with, but they have the commercial production load. I think there are a lot of guys out there producing for radio who have their spots wind up as the audio tracks for TV commercials. I'm certain it's happening, and I think if the radio guys become a little more aware of it and start talking to their local TV stations, they may find some opportunity out there.
R.A.P.: Would you say the television audio producer makes more than the radio producer in the same market?
Wally: I would say that probably, especially when we get into the medium and the small markets, salaries would be quite comparable for a television producer -- and let's not say "audio" producer because a TV audio producer is pretty much a non-existent entity in a lot of places. It really varies, but in terms of industry salaries, I would think, in the medium and smaller market TV stations, it is probably comparable to what they are paying in radio. Now, in the big markets, I think there is a guy up in Detroit that's got a million dollar a year contract to read the news. That's all well and good, and that's the other end of the spectrum. But even if I were to com-pare salaries in Dallas, I think radio and TV producers would be pretty close. I think it is a relative matter of where you are and what the economics of it all will bear.
R.A.P.: Do you think the television industry would welcome people from radio into the production end of it?
Wally: I think there are gobs of opportunities out there to make Promotion Managers and Production Managers aware of what audio can do for television. I think, for a lot of guys, these opportunities will be on a freelance level. It's doubtful you would move into a full-time position. But, in terms of perhaps an extra source of income, I think there are plenty of opportunities. I wish that some of the radio production guys in this town would go over to Channel 4 and 5 and pester the heck out of them and tell them to get their act together. Whether or not it will ever happen, I don't know. It's probably not going to happen in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but we can talk about it in places like Kansas City, Des Moines, even Atlanta. In these places, there has got to be some sense of opportunity.
TV is an interesting business, especially in terms of the promotion of a television station. A lot of people rely on someone else to do it. They use consultants. Consultants in TV are as prevalent as they are in radio -- even more so. So, there is this tendency to just take your big news anchor project out of house -- have someone come in and shoot that film then go to Los Angeles or New York or Chicago to do the post production on it. That's well and good, but I think a lot of guys at TV stations lose sight of the picture. You still have local needs. You often need something that has to be turned around quickly. I think a lot of Promotion and Production Managers at a lot of commercial TV stations would really like to have the luxury of having a little bit more control on the product they offer.
R.A.P.: Anyone that pays attention will notice the "sound" of a TV station varying from station to station as they flip through the channels -- different EQs, compression, etc.. Is this simply inconsistent engineering, or are TV stations attempting to be competitive and do something with the overall audio signal?
Wally: TV stations have Optimods. TV stations have CRL processors. The equipment is there, but there is the long, slow process of educating the people that have dealt with video all their life that there is another side to it, and that is the audio. And audio is not the stepchild it once was.
Here is one of my biggest gripes. It is the little peanut or lavaliere microphone. The news reporter goes out in the field and does the stand-up. Who cares if he is holding a microphone? Well there are a fair number of them that don't want to be seen holding a microphone -- "That doesn't make me look good on TV." So they'll resort to putting on the little lavaliere or peanut mike, usually with a wireless on it. So by the time it gets back to the camera, there is a fair amount of hiss that is put on the tape. By the time it gets edited into the story with the reporter's stand-up and so on and so forth, it is down about four or five generations and comes out sounding grungy as all get out when it hits the news.
An education process is needed. "You don't need to do it this way. You can hold that microphone. It's not going to make you look bad!" Granted, on the ten o'clock news it is perhaps a different story because they are on a set, but they are also in a controlled environment. It is one of the things that grates me, the fact that audio gets treated secondarily. We don't want to see that microphone, so hide that mike under his necktie or under her sweater or something like that. Then they come up to me and say, "Geez, can you fix this? I can hear her sweater rubbing against the microphone," or, "He just sounds so muffled now." There is really nothing you can do. You can brighten up the EQ a little bit, but you can't correct bad microphone technique. I would like to think that I've made a difference here after eleven years, but I still get grungy audio brought to me all the time. However, the people are learning.
Everybody that subscribes to R.A.P. knows the voice of Brian James and has heard his voice on The Cassette. Now imagine...what if Brian had to record all his stuff, not on his super-fine mike processing setup, but with a lavaliere shoved under a necktie (if he wears a necktie)? Would he have that same kind of effect on you? I would tend to think the answer is no. You know he's got the gift of a great voice and the attitude and all that, but he knows how to use the technical facility to enhance that gift, that talent he has.
When you think of it in terms of this great reporter, standing out in the wind with a lavaliere under his necktie trying to convince you that this is the greatest news report he's ever done, it just kind of falls apart. It doesn't come across. TV people are starting to wake up to it fortunately, and are realizing that we can do things a little differently to make it sound a whole lot better. Try watching TV with no sound. It's pretty tough. You can listen to TV with no picture, but try to watch it with no sound. Unless you are gifted as a lip reader or something like that. It's pretty tough.
R.A.P.: I have heard Brian James on Channel 8. What other voices are you using?
Wally: We use Brian occasionally, but John Wells and Doc Morgan are our primary voices. We use Brian for special things.
R.A.P.: Does WFAA keep you pretty busy?
Wally: We are very busy on a day to day basis. News is the animal downstairs. It has to be fed every day. Our production department does quite a bit. They just finished coming off the road with the bus tour -- going around the small towns in the ADI and setting up to do two live TV broadcasts out of each town each day then packing up and going on to another place. We've got a couple of other interesting projects coming up. One of them will be going national, and that is a Christmas parade from downtown Dallas which we have done for the last couple of years. We started syndicating it last year and have picked up a few stations, a few in Texas and a couple of other places. I think they've got 51 signed up for this year. That's essentially an in-house production. We will shoot it with our truck with all of our people, and I will mix it. We've got another project coming up where we will be doing a Christmas special with different church choirs from around the area. That will be a video tape production, but it's going to have pretty interesting audio needs since we can do stereo around here now. We've got the technology available to us, and we certainly want to use it.
R.A.P.: One of radio's claims is the ability to create "theatre of the mind." Does having video with the audio eliminate this kind of creativity in television production?
Wally: Well, everybody remembers the Stan Freberg line from the 60s -- TV just stretches the imagination to 27 inches. Look what you can do on radio: drop the cherry into Lake Michigan which is full of hot chocolate and so on and so forth. He was right back then. He may not be so right today because of the advances made with video. Field tape is commonplace. You can go out and buy a video recorder, and the picture on some of those things is as good as what we were using for field cameras ten years ago. Everything that can be done graphically now just astounds me. I go to NAB and spend as much time looking at what they can do graphically as what the audio guys are showing because it's just incredible. The way a picture can be manipulated, processed, redrawn, painted...you can even do animation on a computer now. It costs a couple of dollars to buy the thing, but TV stations now have access to equipment that can animate. You couldn't do that even five years ago. Take a look at the low end of video processing and a product which has, I think, the greatest name in the world: the Video Toaster. For $4,000 and an Omega computer, I believe, you've got a switcher, video editing, and video signal processing -- for four grand!
The fun part is making the audio stand up to what they can do with video. I like to look at it as making your audio so darn good that they are scratching their heads when it comes to putting video to it. We work in a way here where our video producers basically get a pre-produced audio track and then add their video to it. So, I have the luxury of taking it in whatever direction it needs to go. A lot of it is straight forward. Sometimes we can have some fun. I love challenging our directors here; and I know our directors like the challenge. We're blessed with really talented directors who know the equipment and are real "graphic centered." They make the video sing as much as they possibly can given what they may have to produce. We're fortunate that we have tools, but it still takes a fair amount of imagination. So, there is imagination on the video end of it, and it's probably stretched beyond 27 inches now.
R.A.P.: What production libraries are you using?
Wally: I've got three main ones right now. I've got FirstCom, which is probably the workhorse in the building. I get quite a bit of use out of that. I've also got Network. Some people say, "Oh, Network," and I used to say that, too. But they are up to like 112 disks right now, and I'd say, in the last couple or three years, the quality of their material has been very, very good. And then I've also got, of all things, the Toby Arnold radio libraries, Attitude and Visions. I am getting gobs of use out of those two libraries for TV because, for producers that need fast edits and things like that, the tracks work very well. They are highly percussive and very modernistic sounding and work very well for that purpose. I am very pleased with all the libraries I've got.
For sound effects, I've got FirstCom's Digifex. I've got Network's sound effects library. I've got a very good, cheap library put out by the OmniMusic people called Omni Effects -- I really like that library quite a bit. And then I've got a smattering of things including some of the Electra CDs and Manhattan's sound effects library. I'm kind of a sound effects junkie. If someone has a library at a good price, I'll buy it.
R.A.P.: That sounds like an impressive collection of music and effects.
Wally: Yeah. We go through a lot of stuff here, so it's got to be big. Fortunately, I have the budget to do it on a yearly basis.
R.A.P.: Are you solely responsible for calling the shots on the libraries?
Wally: Yes. I'm responsible for all the libraries. One of the things facing TV more so than radio is the ASCAP/BMI stuff. Channel 8 is a "per use" station. We pay per use. We do not have a blanket license. You can imagine what that might cost for a TV station in a top ten market that makes a fair amount of money. Therefore, we depend very heavily on production music libraries just because that gets around the astronomical fees we would have to pay ASCAP and BMI.
R.A.P.: What's in your studio?
Wally: The audio console is a Harrison MR4 with a dozen stereo modules and 28 mono modules. Why is it so big? So we can have a top-notch, on-line backup that will essentially be able to handle anything in the station. If we wanted to roll a 24-track in here, we could. When we had the debates here -- ABC did the Democratic candidate debate here -- we backed up their audio through the console. We have lines running down to our main studios from the board so we can do backup. That's why it is so big.
My basic recorder is a Studer A80 8-track, and that will soon be supplemented by Solid State Logic's Screen Sound. I've got 3 Studer 2-tracks, dbx 165 limiters, and my main effects boxes are the Harmonizer 3000 with the sample card and the Lexicon PCM 70. I love that Harmonizer. That is the greatest toy ever made.
R.A.P.: Do you have a studio at home?
Wally: Yes, although I don't use it that much anymore. The home studio has the Tascam 38 8-track with dbx. My audio console is the Sound Tracks MR 24-input. I have Magnavox CD players, and I collect tape recorders. I've got two Revox reel-to-reel machines, PR99's, and a Revox cassette deck, and then a whole bunch of junk I've inherited from the station like broken down cart machines, an old Ampex, and an old Scully.