After learning 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS would embed with the Minnesota Air National Guard, we looked at the equipment we would be taking over to Afghanistan to file our stories with.

In 2003, when we embedded with the 101st Airborne, we had Sony PD-150 cameras shooting Mini-DV tapes and our editing format was Avid. We also took along a talking head box which enabled us to shoot live shots from the desert via video phone.

This time around we again stuck with the PD-150 cameras. This light, agile camera proved to be a work-horse in the desert and is small in size so I could shoot in tight quarters like the flight deck of the C-130.

The quality of the picture is good when shot on original DV tape. We lost some elements of one story because of dirty heads but 10 seconds of tape cleaner took care of that problem. Our editing solution this round was Final Cut Pro and this is an easy format to learn and apply. Compressing the video to mp4 was easy and in the end our on-air product looked pretty good.

There is a noticeable fallout on video quality than beta after compression. There also was occasional digital dropout or rouge digital frames which would appear on the tape now and again, but I was able to edit around those areas.

Regarding transferring our compressed video files back to KSTP, this always depended on how fast the internet connection was where we were that day. In Mildenhall, UK, we had a fast connection and could feed a minute-thirty story back in 45 minutes - that was fast.

In Crete, we could not acquire the internet at all. Typically feeding a minute-thirty story took just under two hours. By and large, the system in place for us to turn stories on the 133rd Wing worked very well. Once we reached Bagram Base in Afghanistan, the military had a satellite system called DIVIDS in place which allows military and also media outlets to uplink live shots and do tape feeds.

The Public Affairs Office at Bagram, led by Captain Wenz and his team, and our ace escort Captain Sheree Savage of the Minnesota Air National Guard, helped facilitate feed times with KSTP to send our stories back.

The quality of the tape fed back in real time, rather than compressed video, was much cleaner. In the end, we filed close to 25 stories in two weeks and missed one deadline due to a communication issue. Eric in our IS department equipped Leah with a flip camera to send video blogs back. This portable palm camera worked very well. It was easy to ingest video into the Flip program and feed AVI files back quickly. Lastly, Nikki, our webmaster at KSTP, produced a sharp page for KSTP.com. Being able to send email blogs to her worked well and Nikki did a fine job getting the Assignment Afghanistan web link together. I know families around the country and Airmen at Bagram really liked this link.