CCW Council Bio

Roger Charlesworth is an independent consultant on media technology and an industry expert on multi-channel audio production for television. Roger’s primary focus concerns the integration of mainstream information technology in electronic media applications and the challenges of change management in re-engineering production workflow to exploit new technology.

A former recording engineer, Roger’s extensive audio background includes serving as Executive Vice President of Solid State Logic Inc before moving on to advise major facilities providers such as the Hit Factory Group on technology issues.  Roger’s writings for audio industry publications include a technology column for Pro Sound News and his role as a founding editor of Surround Professional.  His interest in live music production for entertainment television has led to work with both the David Letterman and Conan O’Brien shows as well as consulting on numerous musical specials with artists including the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, and Sting.

Roger enjoys a long association with Saturday Night Live where he recently managed the production’s transition to HD and 5.1 audio and coordinated with NBC on the massive re-build of historic Studio 8H and the build-out of surrounding HD infrastructure.  Roger was extensively involved in SNL’s transition to a tapeless, file-based workflow.  This project involved the creation of a 30 year archive of SNL shows stored online, at full resolution along with an online networking and distribution system for SNL’s multi-camera HD video and audio production.

Roger envisions transmission line real-time infrastructure, processes, and personnel for much of the broadcast plant, being eventually supplanted by the wholesale integration of large-scale storage networking, packet based signal distribution, and asynchronous file-based workflows using desktop applications.  He believes the challenges to electronic media’s exploitation of the advances in mainstream computer technology will require fundamental re-invention of broadcast engineering practices and production philosophy.