Video Greeting Cards

If you watch TV between Thanksgiving and New Year's, chances are you've seen video footage courtesy of the Army & Air Force Hometown News Service. This public affairs agency, headquartered in San Antonio, produces a variety of print and electronic news products highlighting the accomplishments and activities of individual soldiers and airmen stationed worldwide. But each year just before the holidays, the small military agency worries less about the heroic achievements of men and women in uniform and instead focuses its cameras on the universal emotions of people away from their families during the holiday season.

An HNS crew uses a Panasonic AJ-D610WA camera to record holiday greetings from troops in Iraq in 2003. Thousands of messages were distributed to approximately 1,100 TV stations that subscribe to HNS' free news service.

For the past 21 years, the Hometown News Service (HNS) has produced the vast majority of the “Hi, Mom” holiday greetings that are broadcast on commercial TV stations across the U.S. this time of year. In 1984, the first year that HNS distributed the short video segments, 60 greetings were tagged onto the end of a news story, almost as an afterthought. Several stations asked for more, and each year since,the program has expanded. This year, more than 13,000 greetings from overseas military personnel were distributed to about 1,100 TV stations that subscribe to the HNS' free news service.

Tom Taylor, chief of HNS and one of only two civilians in HNS' 11-person Broadcast News Division, began planning this year's deployment in May. In mid-September, he sent four three-person crews armed with Panasonic AJ-D610WA cameras into the field to record personal messages from military personnel. They returned in late October after visiting 80 military installations in 14 countries over 40 days.

“We want to be where service members are away from their families on unaccompanied tours of duty, so we give priority to short-tour areas like Iraq, Kuwait, and Korea,” Taylor says. “And even though we're an Army/Air Force unit, we pick up Navy and Marine units when we can. This year for the first time we put a team on the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier.”

By early November, Taylor and his staff were working 24/7 to digitize, edit, compile, output, and distribute the video messages before Thanksgiving, when stations typically begin airing the holiday greetings. Most of the postproduction work was done in HNS' four Avid Adrenaline suites, which were recently upgraded from Xpress. The suites are connected to an Avid Unity MediaNetwork.

Taylor says the Adrenaline suites have smoothed the production process this year because of their ability to handle various formats. Even though the majority of the footage is shot in Panasonic's DVCPRO format, HNS crews occasionally shoot with Canon XL1 camcorders, which they carry as backup, and additional footage is accepted from field crews on a variety of formats.

As the footage is digitized, individual greetings are grouped by state and output to a variety of formats, including Beta SP, DVCPRO, or VHS. The tapes are then distributed to TV stations by state. For instance, a station in Atlanta that subscribes to HNS' news service will receive all the greetings from military personnel with family in Georgia. In some states, HNS-subscribing stations may receive four one-hour tapes, while stations in smaller states may receive only one half-hour tape. A timecoded run list — generated from release forms that all participating military personnel must sign before recording their messages — helps each station locate the video greetings relevant to their viewing area.

Although HNS works behind the scenes most of the year to provide TV stations with military news, Taylor says the video greetings it produces each holiday season always draw attention to the unit. “We get great reactions from parents, TV stations, and even the service members themselves,” he says. “You see a lot of emotional messages — tough, old soldiers breaking down. And there's always some that surprise you. It's a very rewarding process.”

Check the HNS website, https://hn.afnews.af.mil/index.htm, to view a sampling of the video greetings. Last holiday season, about 6,000 were posted.

Cody Holt is a freelance writer based in the Midwest. Email him at
codyholt@kc.rr.com.