While some people get tape to tape editing nice and easy, others find computers easier to use. For any complex editing, I think that most of us would find the computer easier to learn, since it has online help and such. Though we do a lot of programs which need minimal editing, and that works fine using just tape decks, we've done others with more complex editing. Computers make the complexity much easier to deal with.
Another advantage is that thing like standard credit sequences, including ones with flashy video playback, Public Service Announcements (PSAs), and other short video clips can easily be stored on the computer, and recorded on any tape being produced. Either in a digital editing project, or just recorded directly to tape along with other tape to tape edits. We have some tapes with this kind of material on it, but it can be inconvenient to find them when putting a show together.
In addition, computers are so useful for many things in the creation of audio and video that simply having one will increase the options available to our program producers. The use of sound effects, for example, from CDROM or other sources (including many from free internet sources) is easy with a computer, yet difficult to easily record on tape. Sure, you can play an audio CD and hope you time the effect right, but the computer gets the timing perfect -- and it is no problem finding the sounds by name. Same goes for music files, easily used, in addition to audio CDs (which, BTW, the computer can play automatically during digital editing, as well).
Images for backgrounds, flashy animations, all the nice stuff you see on web pages and things like that, are easily put into videos with a computer. Our Video Toaster can load computer files, but they must be recorded on CDROM, and it is picky about the formats it loads. A newer PC, on the other hand, is much easier to use that way. Plus, it is also easier to make new ones of our own. If nothing else, it lets people more easily make up their own video titles and such on their computer.
This is a computer age, and most of our producers have a home computer. It is now natural for people to expect to see and use a computer based video editing system in a studio. As of April 2003, we are finally in the digital video age.
Digital Video Production For Local Access Cable TV : All about our new facility.