Just about half way
As we are getting close to the half way point, and Rosemary left early morning on her adventure, I thought I would talk about our venue in more of technical terms. The boring stuff.Whenever you see a sports event on television, what you don't see is how it is put together. Normally there is a tv production truck, or in Europe, an OB van. In our case, we have what is called a fly-away system. Usually one or two cameras, a tape machine, and a small audio console for sound all packaged in shipping cases. We take our other cameras, microphones, and tape replay from the Host Broadcaster, in this case TOBO. In Olympics past, I worked for the Host Broadcaster and would have to deal with the 40 cameras, 12 tape machines, and over 100 mics. This time, working for NBC, I take all of their feeds plus their switched show. In NBC parlance, we are called a C-World venue. No OB van, and no 10-12 cameras, only 2. However, we are blessed with two roving ENG crews and 3 edit suites. So we are not a small venue and we do have over 45 people working.
As the snow FINALLY moves in. We had seen a lot of melting and this will help in the look up here. Not everyone is pleased, but we do need the snow.
The rack on the right is our "tv truck" and the people in the control room are getting ready for the race for the day. I am in the white shirt and bib ski pants down on the right. Normally I am just the supervisor for the venue but we are short staffed. I have been elected to be the technical director for this show as well as the video engineer. Brian, who took this shot, is the maintenance engineer, the part-time tech manager, the operations supervisor, etc, etc.
Our audio control room and audio engineer. It is really hard to tell but his tv monitors and speakers are on cardboard packing boxes. The aluminum foil is for blocking the light out and the panels are for sound baffling.
This is one of two non-linear edit suites (computer editers). They are both used for editting packages and features for insert within our shows. These people work long hours overnight to do most of the work. The person sitting to the left is a logger. She is an intern that actually doesn't get paid but is paying NBC to be here. Sigh....youth.
This is TOES. It stands for Typical Old Edit Suite. It is a 4 tape machine, 8 channels of video server, 32 channel audio console edit suite. All of the final pieces you see airing of Cross Country come from this room. All of the voicing and the original cuts come from the control room but are fed over to TOES. They will then clean any errors and do the final package to be sent back to the Broadcast Center in Torino. Interesting but the TOES maintenance engineer doesn't have any....toes that is. He was in a terrible motorcyle accident just before Athens and had half of his foot amputated. So the TOES engineer doesn't have any....toes. Sorry folks, I don't make them up, HE was the one that told me that and thinks it is very funny. Sick humor.
Ciao
david
posted by DaveandBrian @ 12:17 AM
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