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Behind the scenes of TV broadcasters are often interesting, often dull affairs-- I work in the technology side, as a technical engineer installing playout automation software at TV broadcasters (UK based, but work around the world). - What TV stations? I've worked in many TV broadcasters around the world, but i'm not prepared to go into specifics of each operation. They are all quite different from each other (aside from the basic requirement of transmitting your favourite TV shows occasionally, and repeats of others constantly). However I will do my best to provide as much information without naming names. - What is playout automation? Playout automation is the system by which we turn schedules into transmitted output-- the playout automation system controls all the devices in the TX chain, and makes sure that logos, audio overs, squeezes etc. all happen at the same time, and most importantly make sure that the adverts get broadcast. The only reason the programmes are there (for a commercial broadcaster), is to get you to watch the adverts in between. So if you've ever wondered about TV broadcasting, in particular scheduled playout (ie, standard TV shows and less about live news), then i'd be happy to try and answer any questions.
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Nov 26, 2014 15:30
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How is content loaded into the system now? I remember on old "live" shows they would sometimes show a guy running down a hall to insert a tape into a machine that would start the show, but I imagine it's all on digital hard drives at this point. How do broadcasters manage marathons? Is there someone that gets to choose the specific episodes that will air or is it all random?
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Nov 26, 2014 22:33
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What's the "best" automation software? We use a 360 server and excel for traffic/billing since the 360 handles the gruntwork of logging what spots air, and it works great for what we use it for. WideOrbit is super nice, but for a small-rear end station like ours, we really have no need for it, since we have a small number of advertisers, sell by the month/quarter rather than specific flight dates, and don't have to worry about nationals since we get everything on barter with the nationals built in. Stuff like station bugs is handled through the switcher, which in our case is an old rear end analog one because we don't make much money. It's fun to play with T-bars to fade station bugs in and out, and all of that is run through a Playback Omega server that hates us and keeps eating harddrives since it's from the 90's. Our backup is literally an Amiga. How many stations around the world still use beta? We back everything up onto beta when we need backups, or if we have conflicts with recording to get things into the server, since we can always do beta into the server when we have a chance. So we wind up running a lot of poo poo off of beta when poo poo gets hectic. And if we miss a feed, it's always sent on beta from the distributor. I work the other end of broadcast, as the ops manager of a small rear end local station (actually we're a 3-station group in three different DMA's that simulcasts everything but primetime, so you and your wonderful automation stuff is a godsend) and can answer other questions not about playout if OP doesn't mind. We're too small to have a newscast, but we do produce two shows in-house a week, and I oversee that, all the satellite engineering (ASK me about how much i hate the Galaxy 19 satellite!) I run master control, do all the traffic/billing, and a good chunk of the production and editing of what we do produce. So the OP is sort of like my savior when poo poo goes wrong, because we rely on playout automation to make our lives so much easier.
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Nov 26, 2014 23:22
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Fluue posted:How is content loaded into the system now? I remember on old "live" shows they would sometimes show a guy running down a hall to insert a tape into a machine that would start the show, but I imagine it's all on digital hard drives at this point. An incredible amount of content is still from tape-- ingest departments still have multiple full time staff just to ingest content from tape. Some broadcasters (small operations like public tv) still play out from tape, and major broadcasters are likely to still have a way of getting a VTR machine to air as they are reliable and will keep working when your network (IP network) has gone down. However, the majority of playout is from a video server with some kind of attached storage. Tape archives are still the norm I think-- the cost of large scale storage is still incredibly high, not to mention the countless hours of ingest time that would be required to get it on into a file based system. The tape archives range from a room with a whole bunch of shelving, with some poor sod who has to keep it all in order, to fancy robot-operated systems where there are banks of tapes that are scanned (each tape has a barcode), and the system will go and find that tape on request and put it into a VTR to play, so there's no human intervention. Tape is still a very good medium for low cost, reliable medium-long term storage. Hard drives are still expensive (enterprise level storage), and the systems to manage large arrays of storage are equally so. I shall write some more about the workflow of media in the system perhaps tomorrow, it's quite a large topic. As far as marathons, there will have been some researcher or producer that will have chosen the episodes, likely chosen for their good ratings to try and pull in viewers for a prolonged period.
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Nov 27, 2014 00:40
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I have a lot of experience with camera work, to include editing, voicing, shooting, and such. Running on about 5 years in the field. How difficult would it be to get hired on, especially if I have copies of my work to show. Hired at any level actually.
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Nov 27, 2014 01:51
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What software is used for graphic overlays on the screen?
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Nov 28, 2014 02:31
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Soulex posted:I have a lot of experience with camera work, to include editing, voicing, shooting, and such. Running on about 5 years in the field. How difficult would it be to get hired on, especially if I have copies of my work to show. Hired at any level actually. Send your reel to the news director of all your local affiliates, and you have a good chance of getting hired. But also realize that camera/editing is going to be weird as gently caress hours (think 3am-11am type shifts) and it's high pressure to put together pre-pro packages for a newscast as well as handling the live newscast. How big are stations in foreign countries? We run with a single master control op during primetime and me. But we're a small station, we run a solid 3-10 hours off of tape (Depending on how lazy we were with ingest since pur PitchBlue ftp server that requires real time recording at the moment since something got super hosed up with the ftp transfer to the playout server and it takes longer than real time to transfer a file. A half-hour show was taking an hour and a half via FTP, so we're back to real time...which means if i'm lazy and not 100% on top of ingest in the morning, the morning recordings off satellite wind up on tape). What about cable stations? I've only looked at cable headends and they are fascinating. And as a station that runs 100% barter...we have no control over anything beyond our crappy movies we air at noon, and what episode of public domain Bonanza we run. Every actual show is picked by someone at the distribution company. 99% of the time syndicated shows simply run straight through - i know with our FOX programming it's just every episode of Family Guy in a row, same with our Sony shows and...everything, really. So most of your locals are all programmed by someone at the network, and they just run what episode is designated for that date. Sometimes stations will run "evergreen" eps of daily syndicated shows if there's an issue with the feed (IE when one of our two sats that pick up galaxy 19 is full of snow and I haven't bothered to climb up and clean it out) for that day - it's an ep with no specific daily content and can be aired whenever during certain dates - depending on the show an evergreen ep could be good for a couple of weeks (entertainment shows like Access Hollywood, OKTV, Entertainment Tonight, etc) to a whole season. This is also the reason why you may get ads for companies that do not exist in your local area. If you consistently get ads on one station that are for companies that are out of area, odds are it's a show received on barter (or a must-carry show to keep an affil contract - IE your big4 primetime shows) because it's a national feed. It's too much of a pain in the rear end to run multiple sat feeds for things - so it's one national feed for everyone, so if you live in the midwest and keep getting ads for Dunkin Donuts, keep salivating away because it's not going to change. (but you may get a dunkin donuts thanks to transplants like me complaining about the lack of DD) Graphic overlays it really depends. Our system is still mostly analog! So we have to do chyrons in another system, get them quickly into the omega deck that hates us and then get them up on the air. We recently got a playout server that we can send stuff via ftp directly to from our editing suite, so rather than quickly get something ingested off of mini DV into omega to air we can do it directly is CS6 and send it over and run it out of the playout server. we don't do any live broadcasts, so we don't have to worry about on the fly chryons, which are usually generated by something from Chyron corporation, since they're the go-to best. Kinda like how xerox is who you go to for photocopies. it's such a good system it's become a genericized trademark. So a lot of on screen graphics for non-live broadcasts are added in post in whatever NLE the station uses. We're an adobe house, but Avid and FCP both have the ability to generate chyrons. \/\/ pay is SUPER variable. Every station is different. Around here everyone wants to work for the CBS affil cause they're the biggest station and pay the best. The best pay is at an O&O (owned and operated by the network itself, so you'd be working directly for NBC/CBS/ABC vs working for X Broadcasting who happen to have the local affil. contract. O&Os are all big markets, and most likely to be union houses, small markets are least likely to be union. This is an area where you have to do your research. I've heard through the rumor mill Gannet owned stations are lovely to work for, but that could be completely untrue and just a few people sour on the company. A lot of mid-sized markets have stations owned by giant media companies. (Gannet, Tribune etc) where there's a better chance of being paid decently. Small market, one-two DMA stations are going to pay crap cause they just dont have the ad money rolling in to support paying their camera guys 50+k a year. And questions for OP, since you seem based in the wonderful PAL land: How much comes over as NTSC and needs to be converted? Is that all handled by the automation software? Is it just a simple pulldown, or is there some complex algorithm these days? How about SECAM? Get to work with that at all? Also, is there any other station that still has a functioning Amiga that you've seen? Dr Jankenstein fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Nov 28, 2014 |
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Nov 28, 2014 03:37
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FlyWhiteBoy posted:What software is used for graphic overlays on the screen? I always made an animated editable lower thirds in Photoshop and importing it into premiere. After that, it was a simple text title to fit over it. Editable for color, logos, etc. I never include names really because it's easier to just use the title tool in premeire. Rarely will it be more complicated than that. Edit: ^^^ thanks! I have to be a fast worker, so it's nothing, especially if I'm putting a Broll package together for a news cast. I literally just did that for the soldiers being monitored on Ft Lewis coming from Africa (the place they are staying and facilities and stuff) and was able to shoot, edit and distribute in about 2-3 hours with it being QC'd by multiple people. Does it pay well? I heard something that is kind of like Union poo poo, like since I can do everything to include on air talent, I would be held to one position and not allowed to branch over because of something or another. Soulex fucked around with this message at 08:39 on Nov 28, 2014 |
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Nov 28, 2014 08:36
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How do stations determine which syndicated shows they're going to run? My small local station in the 12:30pm timeslot, for example, has bounced between Family Feud, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Cash Cab and, most recently, whatever Celebrity Name Game is. They bounce between shows every six months to a year. How do contracts or employment agreements work for on-air talent? My station (which has literally started doing live, on-scene reports in the last year after more than 50 years on the air) is an NBC affiliate which is basically a training ground for fresh-out-of-college rookies* in most cases who stay a year or so before moving elsewhere. Despite this, they recently snagged a reporter and a meteorologist from a FOX affiliate in Cincinnati and a meteorologist from a FOX station in Wisconsin, which seemed like they'd be better/more permanent gigs. *If you're curious as to the evolution of reporters, it's a fun watch. The meteorologist who left about a year ago went from "slightly better than the guy who was on Tosh.0" to competent in the year or so she was here.
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Nov 29, 2014 16:40
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FlyWhiteBoy posted:What software is used for graphic overlays on the screen? For live broadcasts, it's generally done in hardware. Some piece of equipment outputs a fill signal (which has the actual graphic) and key signal (which is a grayscale image). The switcher (sometimes called a vision mixer) overlays the fill onto something else, using the key as a guide for which parts of the fill should be inserted - full black means "don't use the fill here," full white means "use the fill," shades of gray are transparent. As for what generates those signals, Chyron is a big name there like AA said. When I was in college we started with an ancient Chyron and upgraded to an Avid Deko system, which was a Windows XP machine with custom hardware to output SDI signals. The Deko software was pretty flexible, we built templates from graphic files and filled them in before we were live.
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Nov 29, 2014 18:04
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CBJSprague24 posted:How do stations determine which syndicated shows they're going to run? My small local station in the 12:30pm timeslot, for example, has bounced between Family Feud, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Cash Cab and, most recently, whatever Celebrity Name Game is. They bounce between shows every six months to a year. Depends on what the afilliation is, (if any) how big the station is, and how much money they have. Since we're in the process of spinning down (even though my boss is currently on a futile, 6 hour drive up to our sister station to install a NEW drat encoder because he seems to be of two minds - on the one hand, he admits that we're sunk, but on the other hand, he's still RMA'ing parts back and trying to get new contracts for programming and  ) and we've been a sunk station ever since UPN ceased to exist (I have a couple of awesome things from our UPN days I should photo sometime...lots of Voyager poo poo, old promo reels, etc. it's going to be fun picking through things before the creditors come and steal everything) we have no money to invest in our programming options. Which leaves us with barter...and barter. Barter syndication is when the distributor inserts their own national ads into a show, and then leaves a few minutes here and there for local advertising. If you ever see a show that is not a newscast that is all local advertising (and this can even include ads for big chains - stuff like Dairy Queen is "local" advertising because the ads are all tailored specifically for certain markets and generally DQ will just buy on all the big4 affils.) you can guarantee that station paid cash for that show. Most syndication these days is barter, just because it's cheaper for the affils, and the networks like it because it gets them more money because they get to sell that ad space. What will be available to a station on barter with a content distributor depends on a couple of things: 1) Affiliation. FOX is going to give the local MyNetworkTV affils Family Guy/American Dad/etc barter rights first, since they own MyNetworkTV 2) How buddy-buddy the programming guy is with the guy in charge of clearing a show in your part of the country, and 3) the station's viewership. Since that's an...interesting list of various content distributors (FF is FOX, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is ABC(?), Cash Cab is MGM and CNG is Debmar-Mercury) I'm guessing the station is an indie/solely affiliated with a NonBig4? In terms of slating what goes where in the schedule, it's generally a case of "what gets the best ratings?" And working backwards from there. For example, if the station has a network primetime feed, the highest rated show is going to be in the "access" slot - AKA the slot right after the nightly news and before primetime proper. This is a slot that used to be filled with network programming, and then the FCC handed it back to the locals, so that the locals can usually have an hour or so of decent programming. The law has since been repealed, but due to pushback from local affils, the major networks haven't tried to reclaim it. Then you work backwards from there - if there's no nightly newscast right after primetime, then that slot gets the second-best rated show, or if its a network like FOX or MyNetworkTV that only program 2 hours of primetime a night, then the best rated show goes in after the network primetime, second best gets access, etc. Following that, most eyes are still on the TV after a nightly newscast, so its third best on there, etc. In terms of the bouncing ball of shows, it could just be that they wind up with the ability to air a double run (two different episodes) and just decide to burn the double run of a game show off at the end of the night. OR they're a multiple-DMA station (IE, they have a couple of stations in a couple of different markets) all from one master control suite, and simulcast most of the programming day, and they're contracted to run the "primary" ep in all markets - since with game shows there's really no difference between primary/secondary, they may run the secondary in an access slot that has different programming in different markets and use the 12:30 slot to burn off the contract regulations - we do that with Let's Ask America airing it at 8:30 in the morning sandwiched between infomercials and telemarketers just because we have Family Guy in our other market and Family Guy gets way better ratings, so it gets the access slot. If the same station has the same slate of stuff during the day, that's almost guaranteedly what it is, they have another episode that they can air, so why the hell not air it? The bouncing has likely been trying to find something that still pulls decent ratings in that timeslot. When we programmed to 1am, 12:30 was bouncing back and forth between Chapelle Show, South Park and Reno 911, because it was all stuff that got decent viewership at that hour. Since then, we did an extra hour of the only televangelist that still pays us (surprisingly, for a bunch of racists the Murray family is extremely pleasant to do business with. Coral Ridge Church/D James Kennedy's offspring on the other hand are a bunch of...very unchristian things to call people) If the same station isn't airing those same shows during the day, are you in a college town? Because that is the only reason i can think of for airing a single run of FF or Celeb Name Game (which pulls down insane ratings) at 12:30, since in a college town, 12:30 may as well be primetime. Also, OP, please tell me if I'm not welcome, it just most people seem to be asking programming type questions that are US specific and you're UK based you said, and you focus more on the hardware side of things... Dr Jankenstein fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Nov 29, 2014 |
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Nov 29, 2014 19:11
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It's a small town of just under 30,000 in Eastern Ohio with an NBC affiliate. The nearest "college town" would be Athens (excluding Columbus, which has its own stations), but I don't know if Athens gets WHIZ or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHIZ-TV The rotating game show slot has been after the Noon news and before NBC's run of Soaps starting at 1PM.
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Nov 29, 2014 20:30
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I can say that some shows come at a certain cost. Or at least I believe so. AFN is a military TV station and essentially all the shows we got were for free, under the stipulation that we could not advertise. Therefore, if you have had the unfortunate opportunity to watch AFN, you'll remember the God awful commercials we had to make. Seriously it was like " make a 30 second conmercial about sexual harassment. Due in 3 weeks".
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Nov 29, 2014 22:49
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CBJSprague24 posted:It's a small town of just under 30,000 in Eastern Ohio with an NBC affiliate. The nearest "college town" would be Athens (excluding Columbus, which has its own stations), but I don't know if Athens gets WHIZ or not. It's odd if those shows are bouncing around in spans of less than a season. Right now it looks like they have CNG and Millionaire, so its possible that FF went to a FOX or MyNetworkTV affil from Columbus, since you can't actually sell the same show twice in a DMA. Zanesville is like Mankato MN, where it technically is it's own DMA so technically you can sell the same show to WHIZ and to a station in columbus without running afoul of the FCC, but given that you get columbus channels on your cable providers, there'll be issues with retrans agreements and general headaches that would make distributors unlikely to sell a syndicated show to WHIZ and a Columbus station at the same time. Or WHIZ decided to drop Feud or Cash Cab for Name Game/Millionaire instead by their choice. It would be extremely extremely unlikely for them to drop a show midway through a season, since barter contracts are all season-long contracts so unless WHIZ was not the one to break the contract, it's unlikely as poo poo that it's been every six months. But I can see why they'd be bouncing CNG and Millionaire back and forth looking at their lineup - both are very strong shows in the ratings, and Millionaire is currently in that access slot - so if CNG is looking like it can get more viewers, they probably will bounce that down to the access slot, and bounce Millionaire up to 12:30. Contracts just specify that you must air that show, generally giving a number of times it must air (IE if you pick up a stripped syndication show most of the contracts state that you must air it 5+ days a week, with specifications of if you can run it on weekends and what episode you can air on the weekend if you do chose to air it on the weekends, etc) but they never have specific time slots (they will occasionally have specific dayparts - IE "must air between 5pm and 11pm local" or "cannot air before 3pm" type stuff). It is an indie station in a sense - they have an affil, but they're a rarity in the broadcast game these days - a station that isn't owned by a big media company. Hence the sheer number of different content providers for them. That's actually a really strong daytime lineup too, and my thoughts are FOX dropped them from Feud rather than the other way around since I'm not seeing anything else FOX on their schedule, and FF does better nationally than Millionaire does. And cause I was bored, have some pictures of what a master control room looks like. Note that we are not the norm. We still broadcast in analogue, and we're severely behind the times. Plus, my boss is a hoarder and every attempt I have made to clean up the clutter he freaks out. From the doorway:  The far left monitor is our automated playout sever. It runs a proprietary brand of linux, and supports 3 channels at once (at least the way we have it configured). So we can be ingesting and then playing out two different things to each DMA we broadcast in. (technically we cover 3 DMAs, but we simulcast the two that are in the same state with very very very rare exceptions.) Next to that is (from top down) EAS receiver, preview/on air monitors, preview screen for the VTR there, and the router that deals with all the non-on-air stuff (IE routing stuff to the internal speakers to preview, what's currently assigned to which buttons on the switcher, etc.)  top down, l-r: Preview monitor for the right station (left is one DMA, right is the other), the monitor for our buggy as poo poo omega server, both switchers, the bank of three monitors in the middle is non-functioning, the one on the right is the top VTR, bottom VTR and then the GDMX satellite monitor.  top down, l-r: DVD burner, DVD player, on-air/VTR router (IE so we can pick which satellite goes to which VTR for a recording, as well as if we're routing around the switcher to punch a specific VTR or something on air - usually we only do that after a power outage where we have to reprogram the switchers) Mini-DV deck, two VTR's, one of our galaxy 19 receivers, our big steerable satellite receiver, GDMX receiver, and the patch bay for anything that takes SDI. The VTR up top is our volume control/switch for SDI or composite for ingesting to the playout server, the guts of the omega deck, our framesync, the physical playout server, another Galaxy 19 receiver, a non-fuctioning Scopus IRD receiver, a Galaxy 16/18 receiver, and our black generator to set up genlock. That big hunk of silver is the power supply and the guts of those routers - it's all just printed circuit boards that are hotswappable. It's kinda cool, really, Grassvalley puts out some quality stuff. 
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Nov 29, 2014 23:29
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I've been meaning to write up a post like this for a while now, glad someone else started it. I've been working in tv for a little of 17 years now starting as an editor for newscasts, then directed the news for a couple of years. I jumped over the engineering side 11 years ago as a master control op to maintenance engineer to what is basically the chief engineer of the county tv station. At my old station (CBS/Fox/This-TV) we used to use Crispin as our automation system. It was probably the best on-air system I've used once we got the bugs worked out. When I came over to the county we were using a 360/nexus system which has since been replaced by a playout server designed for PEG (Public, Education, and Government) stations. I wish I could have gone with them though, and not because they invite me to the NAB after party at their booth. Right now I'm in the middle of a huge upgrade for our county station, going from analog to digital broadcasts. All of our gear is HD ready but the local cable providers have told me flat out that they don't carry PEG stations in HD. Additionally we feed some outlying areas over the county microwave network and have a limited bandwidth (3.04 Mbps) to carry our signal. So I'm configuring a couple of devices to stream over the internet to the cable providers, but my long term plan is to hopefully get a transmitter in the next couple of years so that we will be a full broadcast station. One thing that is nice about this business is that it is a kind of small community. In my town (market 125+) almost everybody has worked at two of the stations. Everyone knows each other, I've been to parties at a friends house where reporters from different stations were talking shop and having fun. The downside to that is if you screw up big time, everyone knows it. If anyone has any questions, let me know.
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Dec 1, 2014 18:35
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diremonk posted:So I'm configuring a couple of devices to stream over the internet to the cable providers, but my long term plan is to hopefully get a transmitter in the next couple of years so that we will be a full broadcast station.
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Dec 2, 2014 07:29
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photomikey posted:What are the must-carry rules if you're broadcast? If you broadcast in HD, do they have to carry you in HD? I would think they would just continue to carry you in SD forever... but I don't know what the FCC rule on that is. Since we are a government station, I believe it is up to the cable provider as to what they want to carry. But it might be based on the agreements we have in place with each of them. Since we collect a portion of a fee from the cable company per subscriber I'm not really going to argue with them too much. I know that for a time when I was at my old station Time-Warner was taking our .2 channel which was a really crappy sd fox broadcast instead of the HD .1 channel. I believe that management were pretty pissed when they found out. I'm not sure if this is the case in other markets but how the satellite companies (Dish, DirectTV) took the broadcast in an odd way. Instead of taking it via a fiber connection or uplink, they have antennas on the tallest building in town to take the off air signal. So whenever there was bad weather or issues with the transmitters or if they had problems with the antennas we would get tons of calls complaining.
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Dec 2, 2014 18:35
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I assumed your hope for going broadcast was to curry better favor with the cable companies. Is your hope for going broadcast that people will actually watch you over broadcast?
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Dec 2, 2014 19:27
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Nah, the reason we are HD here but not to the cable companies is just because of equipment. All of our gear was original to the station creation, so it was analog stuff from the mid 90's. Without getting too detailed there are different levels of gear. Analog and digital are the two different sides. You can be digital but not be HD. I've set up almost everything to be in HD-SDI at 1080i until the last step. I use a downconverter to switch it to SD-SDI at 480i with a further conversion to analog for one encoder. It's really annoying to to all the conversion, but until I can make AT&T/Time Warner listen to me that's the way it is. Might as well show off my control room, I'll see if I can dig up any of my old jobs master control.  Left side at the top are the satellite controller and reciever. The stack of three identical IRDs (Integrated Receiver/Decoder) are for our outside broadcasts. They take the ip stream and convert it back to usual video. Underneath them is a couple confidence monitors, Polycom system, dual DVCAM decks, BetaSP deck, stack of converters for the decks, POS encoder, then at the bottom AT&T gear. Right side is a cable box, monitor, frame with a bunch of cards to distribute video, hard drive video recorder. Towards the bottom is our Triscaster.  At the top of this pic is our master clock/test and reference generator. This thing is probably the best piece of equipment we have. It almost does everything we need it to do. Then we have a couple more monitors showing what we are sending out then the cable station return. Under that is our audio confidence monitor. Under that is our router which is a 64x64 router. It's crazy tiny to me considering the router at my old station was about two feet tall and this one is better. I think it is 4k ready which is never going to happen here. Then we have another frame under that for more conversion and distribution. The last two are the playout systems. The top one is a bulletin board server, the bottom is a video playout server. It will play almost every kind of media AVI, MOV, MPEG, but I laid down the rules and we do everything as h.264 MP4. On the right side is a stack of IRDs I need to configure for the cable companies, more monitors and frames. The bottom two are the AJA FS2s we have. These will take almost any video connection and can convert it to anything. Have a old composite deck, it will convert it to HD-SDI in whatever aspect ratio you want.  This is the other side of the same room. Two monitors on the wall are the multiviewer out from the Tricaster. Yamaha audio board on the left side. We had a Mackie board there, but I blew a diode in the power supply so it was replaced. Camera controller in the middle along with rack mounted 10x analog switchers and frame syncs. Right side it the control surface for the Tricaster.
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Dec 2, 2014 21:47
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 Y'all are PEG and you have, nicer, more recent stuff than a commerical station. Then again, there's a reason we're going out of business.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:09
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The only reason we have new gear is a California law referred to as DIVCA. We get about 100k a year from the cable companies to support us. So I'm doing my best to spend that money in a semi-responsible way. But I feel your pain, my old station was run by a tightwad that didn't want to spend a dime on engineering. And before that I worked for Clear Channel and that was almost the same.
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Dec 5, 2014 23:00
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