Please tell us what a Production Director does in a TV station?

My work consists of coordinating and supervising 26 people at the production department. I'm responsible for planning all our productions and ensuring that we can create them to budget.

What led you to choose the Video Toaster?

One of the main objectives of the technological reorganisation of Teletutto was to be able to get rid of tapes for the broadcasting of programmes, and move to an all-digital system. We were therefore looking for an editing system that could also be an output tool inside our broadcast suite. The Video Toaster is an ideal system for editing and edited projects or programmes can be shared over a network. Also, the broadcasting tools it has are intuitive and powerful to use.

What do you use it for at Teletutto?

We installed three systems dedicated to editing and two in the broadcast suite for broadcasting. Thanks to the SX-8 mixer, we've been able to link these systems and data without the need for a patch or external video mixer. These Video Toasters are all installed in 3GHz Pentium 4 machines with two SATA hard drives at 250 GB each with 1GB of ram

How does the Video Toaster integrate with the rest of the equipment at Teletutto?

Every machine is linked through SDI (with analogue audio ) to the host machine. This way all the machines are capable of gathering any data, but can also be used for broadcasting the subject. The Video Toaster machines are part of our Gigabit network.

Data is acquired on the Video Toaster and we edit the video and audio (we record spoken commentary directly to the Toaster), plus create any graphics needed. Finally, we send everything through SDI to the broadcast server.

What has been the Video Toaster's impact on productivity?

At Teletutto, we used to edit linearly on analogue equipment. Formats used were mainly Betacam SP, DVCPro and BVU. Changing over to digital editing changed everything! We completely redefined our production pipeline, and this has undeniably had a positive effect on the quality of our productions. The three editing suites equipped with Video Toasters can still do non-linear editing so we use the Video Toasters for video mixing and titles. Thanks to this we've managed to reduce our productions times a lot. End-to-end edits of a production in an editing suite sent straight to broadcast - what a revolution!

Have you had any difficulty training the technicians in how to use the Video Toaster?

The user interface is truly intuitive, so we only spent a couple of days in teaching the team how to use the editing tool (VT-Edit). The most difficult thing was actually using a computer at all. We trained almost ten people who were so embedded in traditional editing techniques, that only a few of them were familiar with using computers or digital editing.

How many hours of production would you say that Teletutto makes every year, and how much of that is attributable to the Video Toaster?

We produce a lot. I would say not far off 2,500 hours of live TV and 1,500 hours of edited TV programmes, which is mainly put together using the Video Toaster.