Freakin' Cold Part 2

I was in Green Bay this past weekend working the NYG/GB game. I'm sure that most of you watched the game, and you know how cold it was at the game. Keep in mind that it was even COLDER during setup. This was one of those events that doesn't happen every day. It was the third coldest game in NFL history. It was also the NFC Championship game, which meant a much bigger game than normal. Everyone would be watching.

In order to prepare for the game, we purchased every twin and full sized electric blanket between Milwaukee, the city I flew into and Green Bay. This totaled 19 electric blankets. This would total the number of cameras that would be outside in the cold. Several of the cameras are actually located in booths, so we were less worried about them. These were mainly for the cameras. We were worried about a few things with the cameras being out in the cold. First thing of course was the camera itself. Secondly were the lenses. Third was the panhead. The pan heads the cameras are mounted on are fluid heads. They have fluid in them that absorbs shocks and displaces in order to create a nice smooth movement. As the pan head gets colder, that fluid gets thicker and sludges up. It makes it more and more difficult to move the pan head, which will result in poor performance, and possibly lead to the seals of the pan heads bursting.

We have several racks of equipment that normally live out on the field to receive RF equipment and this week, since the studio show was on site with us, to move the audio back and forth from that set on the field via fiber. Each of these also got an electric blanket to provide some extra heat and to keep the heat generated by the equipment in.

The idea behind set up was that once a camera was built and outside it would stay turned on until after the game on Sunday. Cameras started being built on Friday morning, so that would be in the arctic temperatures for 3 days and 2 nights. The electric blankets were draped over the cameras and then cinched around the pan head at the bottom. Once the camera was built, the electric blanket was turned on and would be on until after the game -- same as the camera.

While that was the theory that we employed, we forgot about the UL safety measures. The electric blankets sold today all have a 10 hour timer/limit on them. We didn't realize this at first, but after it was pointed out, we went back to the old standby -- a 75W lightbulb. Two of them in fact for each camera in a standard "clamp-light" you can buy at Home Depot. The light bulbs put off heat that is trapped inside by the elephant bag over the camera overnight. When the blanket tripped off, there was still heat being generated by the lights. The cameras were also generating their own heat, which was being trapped. Every bit of this heat helped, believe me.

Inside the trucks themselves, we had some other temperature issues to deal with. In a typical TV truck, the air conditioners are able to put out massive amounts of cooling, but the heat is minimal. When we parked the trucks on Thursday, it was in the teens so not too bad relatively speaking. The thermostats in the main trucks don't read below 32 degrees F, so they were in alarm. The heaters kicked on right after we got power to them, and we went to lunch. We came back 2 hours later, and the temperature in the trucks was in the 40s. It took about 5 hours to get up to the 60 degree temperature where I feel comfortable turning on the equipment. Once the equipment is on, it will generate heat, which will help to raise temperature of the truck. Eventually, it will generate enough heat that the air conditioning will turn on.

The air conditioners for the trucks are outside in the front of the truck. They're in the cold weather, so the pressure of the gas in the compressors is extremely low. Basically, the higher the temperature, the higher pressure the gas is at, and the colder the temperature, the lower pressure for the gas. When the pressure is low, the compressor will go into a fault. When the sytem called for cooling the first time, it needed to run the compressor in a pre-heat mode for a few hours before it would kick on. During this time, the return air on the equipment side of the truck got to 82 degrees. That's a little warmer than we like. Once the unit was in cooling mode, the compressor is kept warm using Hot Gas Bypass which basically uses the refrigerant as a hot gas to keep the compressor from freezing up.

When we came in on Friday morning, the B-Unit temperature was in the low 50's. The B-Unit doesn't really have that much equipment in it, so it isn't generating any heat itself. It's relying on the heaters to keep temperature. We put some extra space heaters in the truck, and that definitely helped.

Things went well for the most part with setup, barring the extreme cold and the human factors involved with that. I actually had a coax cable break in my hand as I tried to straighten it out to connect it. There were some single mode fibers that suffered the same fate. It got to the point on Saturday where it was difficult to breathe outside. It physically hurt to take a breath. The wind and the cold was biting and would cut into any uncovered flesh almost instantly.

On Saturday night, the decision was made to switch to generator power despite our objections. The switch was made, and we had some minor issues coming back up, but nothing major. We waited until the air conditioning unit came back on. It had to go through a pre-heat process again, but once it was on it was fine.

Then it happened. I got a 5:30am wake up call from Mike who had the same call from the Tech Manager. The generator had failed. We all got ready as quickly as possible for the frigid weather (-18 real temperature, -33 windchill) and drove in, not knowing what we would find. We immediately switched to house power, getting the heaters back on as quickly as possible. In the 40 minutes the trucks were off, the A-Unit dropped 20 degrees. Next up was to fire the equipment and see what happened. Everything except for one camera came right back up, and that did after getting some more heat to it. (The cameras are powered from the truck, so when the truck lost power, so did the cameras) The pregame show truck had issues with a tally computer, probably related to the power issue we had.

Overall the show went extremely well. We noticed before the game the beauty shot, a camera at the top of the stadium looking down inside was taking hits. There was no electricity near it, so there was nothing on it. We ended up sending up some gaffers tape, hand warmers and blanket to the camera. The vents on the camera were taped over, the hand warmers were taped to teh camera and the blanket bungee corded to the camera. This got the camera to settle down a bunch.

Strike took forever due to the extreme temperatures. Much of the cable was pulled as it was onto the loading dock, or coiled in huge 12' coils and left on the loading dock to thaw out. A crew of utilities would be coming in on the next day after they thawed to properly coil them and ship them in a cable bin to meet the trucks in Glendale for the setup of the Superbowl.

Personally, I have no idea how the camera guys did it. I was wearing 4 layers, easily over $1500.00 in cold weather gear and after being out for a few hours was cold. I was moving during these hours of strike. The camera guys were standing there, doing precise movements, keeping critical focus. I know some of the hard camera operators had heating pads strapped to them front and back. Everyone had their own methods to keep warm. A few hours after the game, I was talking with one of the hand held operators inside and he was still shivering. I doubt that he's gotten warm yet.

I'm really looking forward to Glendale now.