FAA Live Broadcast of a Town Hall Meeting
It all began one early October day… we’d just finished the panicked frenzy of the end-of-year crush that assaults every Federal agency department at the end of September. After the 30th, one can breathe a sigh of relief.
Our video production department at the Federal Aviation Administration in OK City, was preparing to move at-long-overdue-last from one building to another for “space consolidation”. We’d been preparing for this, off and on for over a year, as well as doing full scale, on location, video production and editing. (Stop. Go. Stop. Go.) The move was finally going to “officially” take place at the end of October/first of November time frame.
THEN, my boss came in to our office, almost running and short of breath, looking like a guy close to passing out, all wide eyed and such. “The Administrator wants to do his yearly town hall from Oklahoma City in our auditorium instead of from D.C. on October 28th.”
Ordinarily that would have been great except for one thing, we don’t do live TV production out of the auditorium! YIKES. Of course, in the following conversation, we learned that the shoot was to be 2-camera, very basic, no PowerPoint slides or anything, and sent over to the satellite uplink studio (3 buildings away) by fiber wire. Yeah right. I knew the requirements would grow since people in D.C. had time to add things to the presentation.
First up was finding a switcher that would take our cameras, Panasonic 610’s and an input from a computer and an extra possible input for DVD, etc. We had none. In searching around we found several possible switchers that would take SDI and several that would take analog.
There were all sorts of crazy wild solutions thrown about in the beginning. We thought about just buying all sorts of equipment to do the production, but the red tape process for procurement would never allow us to do this in a couple of weeks. We had done a couple of single camera hookups (one camera live all the time) for a few auditorium shows that were broadcast out by satellite… but nothing like this. Look out for progress; here it comes like a run away train. We even contemplated bringing in a local production truck for this occasion, using our cameras (to cut costs), and having the truck send the signal over to the uplink center.
But in trying to solve this problem we needed to look to the future (since we knew this was NOT going to be a one time deal) and try to find a long term solution.
With 3 weeks to put the whole thing together (run hundreds of feet of coax cable for cameras, for feeds to other places/monitors, redoing the stage lights, other monitors, etc.) life became real fun. All this on top of other on-going video projects and planning a move to another building: No I don’t need to sleep.
Finally, we came across the Datavideo web site, and called John Stapsy. After many phone conversations with John, (I feel like we’re such old friends), and having too many people trying to make the decision, and too much red tape on our end and too short of a deadline to get the equipment here, the SE-1000 vs. the SE-800, John saved the day by volunteering “a demo use” of the SE-800, which we chose because it’ll take analog camera inputs as well as other feeds from DVD’s and computers for PowerPoint presentations.
SO, with little more than 2 weeks to go, John agreed to send us (on “trial”) the SE-800 early so I could learn it and use it. Thinking back, it’d been 25 years since I’d switched anything live. Although it was deemed a “simple” shoot, everyone likes a certain level of comfort in a production. With this going out to the entire FAA live, there was a bit of pressure. I was thankful for the early arrival.
The SE-800 came self contained in a travel case with all the connecting wires already wrapped and labeled; all we had to do is hook them up, plug it in and away we went. What a jewel of a portable switcher. We did a practice set up in the studio before taking it over to the Auditorium (in another building across the street) for its final set up.
Much to our glee, when we hooked everything up, it all came on the way it should. After a read through of the instruction manual I figured out the subtle nuances of the SE-800. Then we unhooked the cameras, moved to the main Headquarters Auditorium, set it up and tested all the signals running into and out of the switcher to make sure everything worked.
Lastly, the signal was then sent by fiber wire to another building four buildings away to the satellite studio so they could send it up to the bird. Since we’d never done anything like this before, the apprehension level was running high in multiple departments to see if we could do it.
Audio was being handled by a different group, which was in charge of the projection booth in the auditorium. To make things more fun, two phone lines were installed in another room just off the auditorium so during the broadcast people from around the country could call in with questions to an operator that was standing by.
The operator would screen calls and contact the person lining up the calls for airing. Relevant information would be entered on a computer, displaying who was the next caller and from what region. That was also sent to the podium for the administrator to see on a small flat screen that we wired in.
The administrator then talked to us in the production booth on the second phone line (which we left open the entire time) to tell us that a caller was in place. Then we’d open the special telephone connection into the mixer that fed the auditorium to allow everyone to hear the caller. Oh, it was also a feed sending all the audio over to the satellite uplink. Confused? I was. There were also two mic stands in the aisles of the auditorium for audience members to ask questions for additional audio input into the mixer. Such fun we had.
As the event came closer there were a few extras thrown in by Washington D.C.
They wanted a short video looped to play for the 30 minutes leading up to the start. Only problem was, the video wasn’t finished and they couldn’t tell us how it was going to be delivered. And the “no PowerPoint slides during the presentation ” turned into several PowerPoint slides to be used during the presentation. I know, you’re shocked. Last minute additions were the standing call of the day. All changes had to be inputted into the switcher, which was the only way to feed any video to the satellite uplink.
There were several “worst case scenario” run-thrus the week before as we worked out all the bugs. One “bug” was a feed to a giant flat-screen at the back of the auditorium from the satellite to assist the Administrator in seeing what was being down linked to the masses. Only problem was, in receiving the signal back from the satellite and putting it on a monitor, there was a two second delay in what I switched to what was being shown on the screen. That freaked everyone out.
I solved the problem by running a second output feed out of the switcher and splitting the signal to the giant flat screen and to a small little flat-screen we mounted on the podium. That was only an additional 400 feet of coax. We had an in-house tech run-thru a week before, then a person from D.C. came in the Thursday before the show and we worked through his issues (as usual, he wanted to change things around and, after hours of going through everything it was back to the way we planned it).
All the time, the Datavideo SE-800 worked flawlessly. Then on Monday when the whole contingent arrived from D.C., we had yet another walk-through late in the afternoon, then a full scale dress rehearsal on Tuesday morning with the Administrator.
Oh yes, during those three weeks, I was trying to keep the other guys in the video department working on other projects and packing as much as possible to get ready for the move. It was a fun time.
Finally the big moment arrived. The “movie” that came to us was actually just a music video with a bunch of pictures and dissolves. We put it into a Windows Media Player file and loaded it on the computer. On Monday they also arrived with a bunch of PowerPoint slides and our department took them, cleaned them up and put them into a PowerPoint presentation for the Administrator.
Can’t say everything ran smoothly during the show but the SE-800 and Datavideo came thru for us flawlessly. What a nice easy-to-use switcher.
What problems did we have you say? Well, the cameraman on stage was right below the PA. When the actual show was on, the PA was cranked up even louder and he couldn’t hear half the time when I gave him cues in his headset. In all the rehearsals, they’d never had it that loud and he could hear fine. Fortunately for us, when he figured out he couldn’t hear me half the time, he would set a shot and look at the giant flat screen at the back of the auditorium to see when he was live and when he was off. A third camera for this would have been great but we only had two. We had the battery running the main camera’s external viewfinder go dead on us in the first part of the show. We had to swap it out ASAP, so I went to a cutaway shot from the camera on stage.
Now since I didn’t know he couldn’t hear me when I told him about it, (we had no return feature on the camera, they’re not studio cameras) he ventured off the shot after a few seconds, live out to the world while I am trying to help the cameraman get the battery changed. That caused several people involved in the production booth, including me, to stroke out when we saw the cutaway picture drift on the program monitor.
After several people screamed at me, I lunged back at the switcher to change the shot. I caught my breath and from then on everything went flawlessly.
After it was all over, we packed the SE-800 up and sent it back. It worked like a champ and I was sorry to see it go. A nice little fold up package with color monitors, it worked great in a portable situation.
A week later in the wrap up conference call, all the regions said they thought it was the best town hall so far and that the video and audio was brighter and clearer than the other ones originating from D.C.
Oh no! I see more and more of these on the horizon, as live presentations from our auditorium grow more and more popular. Those out in the regions want the production to look better (slicker) since we are a generation brought up on great live video production.
The SE-800 helped us do just that. Now, a month later, after packing and moving to another building, life can begin again.
Chris Steves
FAA-video director
Oklahoma City-Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center
This article was created by the editors and producers at ScribeMedia.Org.
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