Como Se' Dice?

By now you know that things change constantly. For the most part, things this week went very smoothly. Today is no exception. We had more changes and rolled with the punches. We also had our first major problem of the week.

We've ended up on split shifts since they have people editing overnight. We always need to make sure that we are staffed if people are there in case they have problems. Personally, I require that if one person stays, two people stay. The primary reason for this is god forbid something happens to someone, you need someone there to call 9-1-1. It also helps to have a second person there if you need to troubleshoot something -- one person on each end of the problem. We have a room in one of the trucks that is an executive lounge type place that when there aren't executives/VIP's we can normally be found in. On the overnight, this is a great place to be- comfortable chairs, dark room, 52" LCD screen. The guys on the overnight availed them selves of the room, and when the VP came in this morning, he was PISSED because nothing was quite how he knew how to operate it. The GBB took care of getting things back to where they should have been in terms of the AV setup in the room. The GBB also went over again exactly what it was that the VP wanted to be able to see and all was well in there. We ended up changing router panels to allow for one with a display in it.

During today's transmission test, it is noticed that the entertainment show's backup transmission path might not be correct. In the end, we find that this is indeed true, that apparently it was never faxed. It never could have worked during our previous check-in's. It was also said in meetings earlier in the week that if they needed to go on the back up path, it would come through us, and not the studio show.

Next up was the major problem of the week. We're told that a camera man up in the booth was walking around the backdrop and then heard a pop and the telestrator monitor stopped working. Some may like the idea of not seeing someone draw on the screen, but this is a necessary tool for this game. The monitor is special in that it has a film on the front of the monitor that senses touch (actually capacitance/resistance) and sends that out a serial port into a computer, and that's how you draw for TV. This isn't something that's just lying around. This is actually a client provided item, so we're not on the hook for it, but we do try and fix everything and anything. We started in 2 directions immediately. The first direction was to have people work on diagnosing the exact problem and seeing if they can repair it. The second was to locate another touchscreen locally and try to get the drivers for that touchscreen loaded on the PC and use that one. Our sister truck carries an old-fashioned simple telestrator. This was to be our back up plan. Despite valiant efforts, we did have to go with the back up plan. In the end, no one at home really noticed. Troy still had a telestrator and was able to draw and point out the important things to the viewer.

The X-mo guy decided AFTER THE PREGAME SHOW WAS ON THE AIR that he didn't have what he needed in his router. He needed to have some things such as the replay device his camera is going into in the router. I make the changes he needs and send it (as well as dealing with about 100 other things -- more on those later). Shortly after this change, the tape operator comes to me and tells me that some one is changing the input to his machine. Trying to figure out what the hell is happening, I lock the input to his machine. Everything is fine until 5 minutes later when i'm told that the router for the X-mo guy in the other truck isn't cutting. I send Nick over to look at it, and he tells me that it is locked and unlocks it and starts cutting around. When he is cutting around, he's changing the input to the machine. After having Brian and Nick chase all the cables down, I find that I screwed up and instead of putting in the machine as source, I put it in as a destination in the data key list. Once I fixed that, all was well.

Next up is probably going to be one of my favorites of all times (this was actually going on at the same time as the above). Knowing that we were out of video timing when we fed the house during rehearsals on friday, I wanted to make sure that this was fixed since it is the biggest game of the year. I get the number of the house guy from the tech manager and I verify with the house guy that he is seeing me in time to him both audio and video and that I can break the path individually, audio and video. I'm told that yes, everything is good, and he is hearing and seeing me switch to bars and tone. Soon after, I want to break this feed away from everything else so I can be sure of not screwing up the player introductions. Soon there after I'm told that it's out of lip sync. I'm confused as how this could happen since everything in the truck is in time lip sync wise, and all i did was make a router change- no path changes ocurred. I change it back, and i'm told it's back in lip sync. In trying to work out the problem, I fed tone to the commissioner's booth for a little while. FINALLY it was discovered that the audio wasn't actually changing with the video and NEVER was, even early in the morning because the audio guys were just feeding it off the net return DA. Once we get into the game, I'm being told that the commissioners booth (and all the courtesy feeds) are getting Spanish audio. This one really confused me because we don't have any spanish audio in the truck. SAP is a totally separate audio feed direct to LA TOC without ever touching the truck. Once I made that realization, I knew it had to be on Net Return. The guys in transmission were feeding us the SAP channel on 7/8 (which is what was feeding the courtesies) instead of Lt/Rt like they had been doing for the studio show (and the rest of the season).

To the viewer at home, the show was nearly flawless. We had one transmission problem that I'm aware of, but that wasn't anything with us. Everyone on the crew rose to the occasion and the end result was one of the best football broadcasts I've ever seen. It was a great game, but nothing was over the top. It was treated with the reverence it deserves and the outcome was a masterpiece, a game that all can be proud of for all time.