Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Inside the control room: turning NFL football into primetime television”.
20 to red have a good one. Everybody ready five four three two one roll right, upright track ready, 15 out of bread, it’s very stressful! You got to be you got to be zoned in. You have to be focused for three hours, three four hours whatever the game may be. If you go to air and it’s not it’s not right or there’s a mistake, millions of viewers see it. You don’t get a chance to edit it. You get one shot. Everybody wants to put on a clean product.
You know something without a mistake. A lot of times the viewer at home doesn’t know what the mistakes are. They don’t see them, they don’t hear them very rarely some you wonder if they even care, they just want to watch a game. We know what it takes to get on the air. I laugh because my father used to think it’s a big voodoo box. You know watching tv, because all this stuff just comes out it just spills out on the air and he can watch it at home until he saw what it takes to put one of these on.
This is actually a very well oiled machine. Eight fibers interconnect the two trucks and move over 3 500 signals on those eight fibers. I think we probably have somewhere between 150 and 200 people credentialed for this weekend, that includes stage managers, statisticians runners, camera guys, technical director, audio utilities, cameramen i mean ultimately, when it comes down to it. Everything that we’re trying to do is all about telling a story and giving the producers and directors the tools that they need to tell that story.
We want to give the the viewer the best experience graphically visually orally audio. Everything is all for the viewers. If we see things happening other places we cover it show it discuss it, its instincts uh its reactions and it happens really quick. I’M the director of the show so basically in charge of the visuals that you see for the most part and basically i’m in charge of all the cameras during the course of the game.
You know for a given game, i’ll have 15 cameras on a given sunday. You know maybe we’ll have whatever it is: the 13 tape machines, the fox tv trucks, they’re three 53-foot trucks and they contain the entire show, and then we have another 53-foot truck. That’S just cable cam, we’ve done all 32 stadiums. Now, in the 11 years we’ve been doing this, so it’s gotten easier over the years.
You can walk in and you know right where to go and write what to do and we’re pretty quick at it. The computer is controlled through the joysticks, just basic inputs. I have up and down and then left and right and forward and back that signal goes through the computer.
The computer takes it to our winch station, where our motors are. We have three motors x, y and z, and if you remember your basic algebra from high school, we have what’s called a cartesian grid and it flies in an xy pattern. This way and a z up and down pattern that way, and so i can control in any stadium. I know which way i’m going left and right. It’S a basic joystick camera.
There’S a lot of a lot of remote control, operated cameras, they’re, really, all basically the same. You’Ve got your pan, your tilt resume focus uh. The only thing that makes this one different and it’s a big difference is that this camera has a roll on it.
Where i can control the horizon, we can finish each other’s sentences. It’S like hey. Do that thing where you yeah, okay, shorthand language, i mean you know when we get down toward the end zone. If they’re gon na run into the end zone, he’ll tell me to come up, give me some z and i’ll i’ll come up a little bit to show him the play develop.
I’M the fox’s lead technical director for nascar and the nfl during the show. I punched. The buttons mixed the video switch, the video the director makes the decisions, but i physically make that happen. It’S more of a monologue from rich to us. That rich is doing a lot of talking and we’re all listening.
As he’s talking about ready. One take one ready: two take two, you know: that’s letting the camera guy know that he’s ready to take that camera settle down and you’re about to go on the air so that the camera guy doesn’t swish pan or something like that. It also lets me know be ready to take that camera and a lot of times. You know that wants to happen right at a at a precise moment that he’s trying to go from one thing to another, and so sometimes the cuts can be very uh.
Very i’m precise charge of the live cameras, so when richie calls the replays that we’re shooting the things that we need to be shooting, whether it’s a quarterback reaction, whether it’s a wide receiver isolation, you know with a defensive player whether it’s a coach, you know whether It’S a sideline reaction. One of the things we try to really push is all the subtleties and i think we do a good job, but we’re constantly pushing just the reaction. Shots of both sides of the ball. Some of our greatest shots honestly are sitting on the bench where you’ve got a guy.
That’S just cost his team. The super bowl and he’s got this emotion on his face and now you’re you’re sitting there locked on him and we have. We haven’t moved, but there’s no other camera in here that can get that because of specific angle or there’s a coach in front of him or whatever. So some of the greatest stuff we’ve done is right. There uh i’m actually now, i’m a i’m actually an office guy, i’m director of engineering and technology for fox sports remote operations.
So i oversee technical planning for large events, super bowl, world cup, uh us open golf, but also specifically oversee technology initiatives such as 4k. The thing that always comes up is clarity of replay. We want to be able to see what’s happening, see what’s going on and give the viewer at home.
The best possible image. 4K is essentially 10 times the amount of pixels of video information, as regular 720p is so we can zoom into an area and get a lot more detail, which is why we’re using 4k. Another big initiative of fox sports, high frame rate cameras for more frames per second, more images per second, which enable a clearer replay.
We can do things like like zoom in look at a guy’s foot and with a bunch of frames per second, you can see. Okay, you know what he was. He was right there, whereas before that image might have been blurred looking across a couple frames, technology is so good.
The pictures are so good. The ability to play back replays is so fast. We have 11 evs machines, most handle four inputs, two outputs, as soon as the play is over barely before the guy stands up to go back to the huddle.
He’Ll know which replay machine to go to. We sell directly to the producer producer, may ask: who has it or a lot of times? He knows who should have it wants to see it from those angles so selling is is just getting to the producer, letting them know. I got the best look at this. This is the one you should go to air with we’re fortunate. Our producer trusts us for the most part.
If he hears our voice and he hears he hears, how intent we are exit, it’s great on x y, has the look whatever he’ll uh he’ll go to it right away without even question. I prefer the subtle real things, as opposed to the guy grandstanding for the camera. So the guys that have been with me for years know don’t sell me a reaction where a guy’s self-servingly, acting like an you know, show me the shots when they come to the bench and they don’t realize cameras are on them and there’s a little wink. A little smile, a little tap on the helmet from a coach. Those are the shots i like to see. You know it’s not just the quarterback celebrating after a touchdown, it’s the defensive back with his head down like holy christ. What just happened! Well, my name is fred aldis and i am the audio consultant for fox sports and their senior mixer. I mix nfl for them and i mix and design all of the nascar coverage for them during nfl. I want the viewer at home to be a part of the the audience in the stands and in a 5-1 show on the surrounds. I want them to feel like they’re sitting in the crowd, so i put crowd 360 degrees around my announcer’s in the center speaker and then fill in the front left and right with my effects mix, because that field of play never changes.
So that’s that’s kind of being an observer of a game on this console. I have 96 physical faders and they are dual layer faders. So i have 192 inputs into this console that i can manage at any point in time, while i’m sitting in here during a game.
I listen to a director, a producer, an associate director and i do my mix and there’s something else going on. I have to deal and troubleshoot that so i’m listening to any anywhere from five to eight things at one time trying to juggle that many balls it’s hard to really listen to my mix, to where i’d like to. But i’ve learned over the years. What to listen! For and how to listen for it, i do do a lot of that by feel. I heard hear the director call a camera cut and i just automatically go to it.
So at this point my credit has pretty much become reactive. As far as some of the camera cuts and what i’m listening to and how i react to those, sometimes i open different mics to make more sense with the picture versus the cameras that are close up. If you’re on the sidelines of a game, you hear things that people at home watching on tv never get to hear or experience.
So we are walking a fine line between that audio and yet not giving away state secrets, because believer coaches watch tv tapes now to pick anything they can up off what they hear from the line of scrimmage. What our industry has done over the years has provided up close video and personal video. They want to hear the audio the same, and sometimes we can provide that. Sometimes we can’t, i think, from from learning from people who did this job. Well, as you let people do their jobs, i think on sundays.
It all comes together with a balance of everything you know sounds, but let’s not overdo it. You know tight pictures, but let’s not overdo it. X’S knows, let’s not overdo it. My job is to find the balance to bring everything together and make sure it all fits. It’S really neat because it’s like working on a great team.
You know seeing all those everybody come together and they all know their job. They know what they’re doing they’re the best at what they do. You know broadcasting is similar to being on a you know. A team, troy aikman would say the same thing. You know he might be the star of the team, but it takes a whole team to actually put the broadcast together. So uh we just spend the weekend all together. We have dinner together. We spend a lot of time together and that’s the best thing spending time together as a broadcast team. I mean we’ve known each other for years, even before we got on this crew a lot of us how how to put things together, though they said, there’s a hierarchy there, not yet for a half hour when you cut that out, yeah that’d be the boss. There are times i spend more time with these guys than i do with my family, because not only this, i go right into nascar and that’s 20, some weeks and you’re spending four days a week with them and only two at home. I think i think most of us in this business enjoy doing what we do, because we like it. We have fun doing it and we’d hate to have a real job sitting behind a desk all day, and so you hear that three count going into the open of the show i’ll tell you what the rush is. Absolutely incredible. Knowing there is no going back, there are no retakes, you have to do it right, do it right the first time and uh, and it’s a pretty big rush and i still get that rush live tv is the only kind of tv you want to be. In now there are people a lot more creative than i am who can sit in an edit room and create a show from scratch, and those people are really smart and really talented, but there’s nothing like the adrenaline of being part of a live broadcast.
You just don’t know how it’s going to go. You can talk to broadcasters former athletes, you know, there’s nothing like playing, but the closest thing you can get to playing or coaching is being in tv and covering an nfl game. You .