WSEE News Watch is the CBS affiliate in Erie, Pennsylvania. Like many television stations in the United States, WSEEis always rushed to be ready for the digital conversion. The station had decades of analog and digital equipment mounted together. As new equipment became available, it was added without a plan. Some equipment was intended to be redundant, as part of a “backup” system. Others were kept just because the station was worried about disconnecting them.

As a result, the editing studio in the newsroom looked like an electrical and cabling nightmare. Equipment was stacked on tables, the floor and in an old enclosure. Station management did not wish to bring advertisers or the public into the suite because of all the clutter. The station now had state-of-the-art editing equipment in the newsroom but it was housed in the same old wood and particle board furniture which had been in the station for decades.

Great Lakes recommended a variation of the Advantage Digital Office Suite Configuration, combining a complete Advantage standard work station with a full-size enclosure with #10/32 tapped rails. We also added a second small counter to allow for an additional workstation within the edit suite space. The enclosure was powder coated in the same finish as the work station and the entire configuration made the equipment look like it belonged there.

Cable management became an easy task and both the enclosure and the work station made it easy to connect, network and power all the equipment in a seamless manner. The enclosure was still able to accommodate the older rack-mounted tape decks and editing equipment as well as the servers for the new digital equipment, making it easy for editors to move easily back & forth between the two technologies.