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Mid-Day Report

October 9, 2010 in Media, Misc! with 2 Comments

Oh, the humanity!

Ok, I’m exaggerating, it’s nowhere near that bad.  But the 3-feed is total mayhem as expected.  Just people trying to figure out where to hook up, who is sharing which camera, etc.  It’s nuts.

As much pre scouting that you do, it’s all different when there’s two other networks cramming into the same space and trying to access the panels.

Consol Energy Center truck interconnect room.

Everyone is very happy with the connectivity, both amount and location.  It’s still growing pains figuring out where everything is though.

All three networks are taking dasher cam and center scoreboard robotic. Hopefully we can get it kicking good tonight.

Still have to check on all of our house stuff, and heading out to do that now.  One of my big tests tonight is NHL Center Ice.  We have bought a stadium subscription and should be able to put it on the in house network.  We’ll see.

Fingers crossed.

TV Technology

August 25, 2010 in Gear, Media with 1 Comment

TV Technology has been a weekly part of my professional career dating way back to the early-mid 90′s.  If you’re college student in a “trade” you always load up on all of the free subscriptions, and TV Technology was one of the better reads for gathering information on all that BetacamSP stuff we all longed for back in the day.

Consol has been featured in a number of these, and I find it kind of funny that I’m giving interviews for all of these trade mags that I used to read.  Back when we were younger we would look at the guys in these articles and think “I’ll never be that smart or get there”.  Turns out the smartness requirement was highly over-rated. ;)

Robin did a pretty good job trying to fit 100 topics into a tight word count.  I would have liked to go a little bit deeper on the file management and stuff like that, but honestly our setup is so complex and there are so many layers of technology in there that it’s tough to get it into one story.  It’s sort of like when I knew Phish was on David Letterman or something like that and I’d hope they’d let them jam on for a 10 minute song instead of the standard 3.5.  Nice thought, but not grounded in reality.

Here’s the article. 

Return Of The Blog(s)

August 6, 2010 in Media with 4 Comments

Well it’s obvious that I’ve been a bit busy the past three weeks trying to get ready for this weekends events and the big opening.

I could have stayed up even later to bring you all the breaking news on Consol Energy Center.

Instead, I got creative and got the bloggers back in the house for a follow up tour.  One of my best moves.

So instead of having to write up a bunch of new stories, I’ll just pass on their links as they come in.

Some of my best work.

Seriously though, great to have everyone back, plus a few people that couldn’t attend last time.   It should be known that Tony from The Confluence blew us all off so he could re-watch the Heritage Classic press conference over and over again.

I stole this photograph from Brian Metzer.  Weeee!

Brian Metzer has his photo gallery up.  Watch me be unethical and steal one of his photographs for this blog post.

Tom Mast from HockeyBuzz had his post up first.  Word is The Pensblog was going to be first, but they were huddling up together trying to figure out how to resize images for their front page.  Woooooooooooo.

I really like how this is working out.  I probably could have got a lot more posts of if we had done more tours.
Seriously though, sincere thank you to everyone who came out today.  Great coverage the first time and I’m looking forward to reading all of this round’s impressions.

The Six O’Clock Butterflies

April 16, 2010 in Creative, Media, Misc! with 3 Comments

After being involved in almost every game presentation for the Pittsburgh Penguins the past 11 years, I find it oddly disturbing to be sitting at my desk passing the time at 6:00PM on a game day.

While I’ve been working on the Consol Energy Center project for the past two years, it’s only been three and a half months since I’ve been focused solely on the project and been given a temporary pardon from most game night duties. As a result, I’ve been able to skip a few home games and spend some quality time with the kids that would otherwise be spent at Mellon.

So while I’ve appreciated the relaxed game nights, I’m now trying to adjust to something that I’ve been so used to for the past decade or so that I’m now actually having withdrawal symptoms: the 6 O’clock butterflies.

6:00PM (or 6:30 for the regular season) is when the doors open and the fans begin to slowly filter into the building. For some it’s a chance to sit and relax and get ready for pre-game warm ups. For me it’s the time when my stomach tightens and I start pacing the building.

As I said in an earlier post, during the playoffs you are constantly editing and re-editing, and then tweaking, and the re-tweaking all of the things about your presentation. At the game Monday, the puck hadn’t been dropped but 10 minutes and the editors were already working on content for tonight’s game. The game producer is taking all sorts of requests and directives for things that need to go into the game and constantly changing his format from hour to hour.
The light show is tweaked, rehearsals run and then run again, timings are run through until we all know the videos off by heart.

But when doors open, it all ends. No more chances to fix. Time to roll with what you got. And that’s when I get sick to my stomach.

Did we think of everything? Did we get it right? Will the fans like it? Do the bosses like it? Did Billy get the timing right? Were there any special requests that we had to take care of? Are the cryo guys here?

So I walk. And I ask the producer if everything is ok. I go look at the videos at the editors’ desk to make sure there were no mistakes. Walk out to the big screen. Look at the video for a few minutes to make sure all is good. Something pops into my head and I call the producer and ask him if so and so is all set up. I go look to see if Jeff Jimerson is there. If I don’t see him, I go ask the guard at gate 2 if JJ has come in. If not, I walk out to Center Avenue and look for his car. This leads to more neurotic text messages to the producer to ask the same things I’ve probably asked twice already. I’m a notorious triple checker, and I’m sure it annoys the heck out of everyone I deal with.

At some point I’ll start pacing the concourse again, looking for things to worry about.

Yes, it’s crazy. But it’s the way I’m wired. And I kind of miss it.

The banner raising home opener this past year may have been the thing I was most nervous about. We had so many visual elements in the show that it was easily the most complex show we’d ever done. But I was focused on one thing, and one thing only – the mechanical clamps that released and let the drapes drop down. If I would explain to you the ramifications of one of those things failing, I would probably heave all over my keyboard.

After 10 years of shows, and two runs to the Stanley Cup Final I can honestly say that one had me shaking. Never before any show I ever was a part of did I shake. But I did that night. We worked with local lighting company Three Rivers Entertainment for that one, and I walked up to Wade Shaner, the director for the show about 15 minutes after doors opened. The conversation went like this:

Me: “Wade, is there anything you can possibly tell me that will make me feel better about these drapes dropping like they are supposed to?”
Wade: “Nope”
Me: silence.
Wade: “Look, we’ve done this 12 times before with this kind of system. All 12 times it’s dropped”
Me: “So we’re number 13?”
Wade: “Yep”
Me: “Great”

But hey, it all worked. It took a team of 30 people – producer, control room people, stagehands, lighting techs, house electricians, house utilities, SMG management, Pens management – to make that all work flawlessly. And it did.

Weird thing standing on the ice with that amazing crowd as loud as can be, and the situation, and the circumstance around the event – and then two minutes after it was done I was sitting by myself in relative silence at Gate 5 for the next 20 minutes just trying to get myself back to normal.

So the 6 O’clock butterflies. Not the most pleasant thing in the world, but for some reason I find myself missing them.

The Playoff Rush

April 13, 2010 in Creative, Media with 2 Comments

“I can’t believe we start the playoffs on Wednesday”

I heard that about 5 times today from 5 different people when I was at Mellon Arena.   Playoffs are an interesting time when you work for an NHL team due to the short time-frames you have to get work done and the uncertainty of the schedule.  Whereas you may have weeks and even months to get ready for the home opener, in the playoffs you may only have a few days.   Couple that with the overbooked month of March we seem to have every year, and the crush to get ready for Round 1 Game 1 can wear down even the most seasoned of veterans in the business.
 Here’s a small inside look at preparation the TV and presentation people will deal with for the next two week to two month.
 
Lights, cameras, cryo-jets.    If you were at the regular season games last week you saw some big lighting sets hanging from the rigging of the dome.  We had brought in an additional 60 or so lighting fixtures fort the last game at Mellon and in a perfect world, they would still be hanging there.  
But it’s not a perfect world and the circus came to town and all the lights went out.  As I write, I’m sure the trucks are being unloaded with a completely new light rig that will hang over the ice at Mellon for one last playoff run.   So the lights will be hung after practice.  They all need rigged, focused, and ultimately programmed.  You’ll have a lighting director and game producer probably at the arena until the wee hours – if not until dawn – syncing up the lights to the music for the opening sequences.  Downstairs a video editor will be constantly churning out new versions of the opening video and running them upstairs so the programmer can make adjustments.  Makes for a long night.

We also like to use the cryo-jets to blow smoke on either side of the runway when the team hits the ice for the start of the game, and those all need to be installed and tested for safety before Wednesday nights pregame.   Any time that the Penguins change the music or the length of the song, adjustments have to be made to the lighting programming 

Opening Videos.  It’s not unusual to run the same opening video during the regular season for several months at a time with only minor changes.  In the playoffs, it basically gets blown up every round, with significant changes from game to game.  With playoffs, come storylines. And with storylines come better chances and ways to engage the home crowd.  Add the fact that we also do a full video for full-ice projection and you are making serious modifications from game to game.  Now remember the deal with the lighting.  With every change to the video and music we make, the lighting programmers have to adjust as well.  Lots of late nights at the arena for two months.  Not to mention that these are very long animated files that have to be rendered.  So it’s not unusual to work on something for hours, render it out for an hour, only to find that it doesn’t line up the way you need it to and have to go back and redo it.  Sometimes 5 seconds of changes turn into 4 hours of waiting.
 

Trib Tron.  We all love the big screen.  It’s one of the best things about the Penguin community.  But it’s another screen to do programming for.   An editor will start with about a 10-15 minute loop of logos, videos, player headshots, etc at the start of the series.  With each game, he adds recaps.   And more videos.  And then more games.  And so on and so on.  It’s a daily grind to keep the latest stuff playing out there.  We also have all of the infrastructure additions we make to ensure that it’s a positive experience for everyone that attends.

If you recall, last year there were some problems with some of the transmission of home playoff games – with one game even going out for more than an entire period.  Because we run extra cables down there tied directly into the scoreboard and trucks, the people on the lawn were the only people in the Pittsburgh DMA to see that game last year in its entirety.  Fingers crossed to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
 
Presentation changes.  Corporate sponsorship is a big part of any pro sports team.  It must be there for teams to survive.  But with the way budgets work, there’s usually less sponsored elements in the playoffs than the regular season due to the fact that you can’t quantify how many home playoff games there will be.   This changes our entire approach to the game.  Not only does the music get harder, faster, edgier – but the videos do as well.   There’s a palpable difference in the crowd during the playoffs and regular season.  Even if you’ve only been to a few of each you can tell that.  We try to play off that, to enhance it, to promote it.   Plus every team wants to play off the story lines.  The Max “Ssshhh” for example, the Fleury save on Ovechkin.   Big moments, and they get a lot of play the rest of the playoffs.  
This all sounds easy, but with the crunched schedule it’s a race to get done nearly every home game.

Scale it up.  With the playoffs come more TV networks.  With that comes more cameras, cables, TV Trucks, etc.   Temporary camera positions are built.  Extra cable has to be able run throughout every conceivable crack and crevice of Mellon Arena.   One of the things I’m most looking forward to at Consol Energy Center is the face that we have an abundance of camera positions and cables, hopefully making the playoff prep a little easier.

Basically, it’s the regular season on steroids.  For a regular season game against Ottawa we’d normally have two TV feeds – home and away.  For playoffs, we’ll have home, away, US national, and Canadian national feeds in.  And if you are playing Montreal you end up with French Canadian national on top of that.  All of these TV networks, with all of this cabling, cramming into the same, undersized areas.  It’s tight.
The uncertainty.  We all love the NHL playoffs.  There’s simply nothing better in my mind than watching these guys battle for two months for the Stanley Cup.  If there is one thing that I could live without though, it’s the uncertainty of the schedule.  Watching elimination road games with no idea if you have to prepare for another home game, or even if you have to start prepping for another round.  You end up hitting refresh on web scoreboards every 15 seconds trying to find out when and where you play your next game.  Because what happens in those road elimination games, win or lose, completely changes how your presentation will be for your next home game.  And when a round is complete and you are waiting to see what day you play?  Agonizing.  4 hours saying “why have they not released the schedule yet???”  Texts back and forth until the wee hours.  Using every source you have to try to get inside info. It’s the most brutal thing about the playoffs for me.
 
Everything else.  The world doesn’t stop for the playoffs.  In spite of it being our focus, it’s still business as usual with everything else.  Web video (plus we travel crew to road playoff games), marketing stuff, new arena meetings, etc, etc.  They all still keep rolling, and they all have to fit in somewhere.

In short, when you work in this business you are rarely “not busy”.  Even the summers are packed.  But during the playoffs on a daily basis, you find yourself saying things like, “how’d it get to be 8 o’clock already?” and “it’s 2 AM?  What?”

So it’s one big long rush.  Because you get so wrapped up into it all the highs and lows of the team affect you that much more.    By the end of it, whether it was three weeks or two months, you are completely spent and ready for silence and a long vacation.  But ultimately, it’s worth it.   It’s the playoffs.  It’s what it’s about.  And it’s the best time of the year.

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