Or what my former boss called “making the sausage.”
Carey note (2020): Before I started teaching multiplatform journalism and television production, I spent over 20 years doing it myself. My journey began in the University of Georgia's "University News" newsroom (now called Grady Newsource), continued on to Fort Myers, Fla. for almost three years at WBBH-TV and WZVN-TV, and then eventually across the country to Portland, Ore.
I spent five years working for the Fox affiliate, which began as KPDX-TV and eventually duopolized and swapped affiliations with KPTV-TV. That's a story for another day!
I then moved over to KGW-TV, the NBC affiliate, where I spent the next 12 and a half years directing, tding, running handheld and robotic cameras, keeping track of audio, and a myriad of other things.
This tour of the KGW control room was originally posted on October 22, 2017.
Every so often on Twitter, I will give a behind-the-scenes tour of how we get news on the air at KGW-TV. We are the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon, which is currently (2017) the 22nd largest in the U.S. (out of 210 markets). We put approximately a gazillion hours of news on the air each day, both for KGW and for KRCW, the CW affiliate.
As a director, you will rarely see me on the air. I am the one putting everyone else on the air. Essentially, I am a live, real-time editor. I sit in front a bunch of buttons and make things happen.
Over the years, the number of things I have to make happen has grown. We are now “automated” in the market, meaning your director-types are also your audio operators, graphic operators, camera operators, video players, video switchers, talent cuers, and probably a few more things I am forgetting.
This is more or less my view when I sit down.
This is my main control panel, called “ELC.” It switches the video on the air, inserts graphics, rolls clips, takes cameras. Other versions of this are Ignite and Overdrive. Same idea made by different companies.
If you follow me on Twitter, you have probably noticed my icon is a “Take” button. That’d be the button I smack the most during a show. (@DirectorCarey on the Twitter, if you are so inclined.)
Your ELC director is essentially a one (wo)man band. My left hand controls audio, graphics, and ifb (how we cue the anchors/reporters). The picture below is the view to my left.
My right hand does the main video switching, advances scripts & rundowns so I can see things like run times and outcues for stories, and controls the cameras. The picture below is the view to my right.
My left foot (yes, the feet are involved, too), hits the foot pedal that controls my time clock, so I know when to put in graphics and when a story is about to end. That’s the pedal on the left. The double pedal on the right can also advance scripts, but I’d rather do that by hand, since my right foot is busy keeping me from falling off of my chair. Really. I’d be the short director of our crew. Until quite recently, I was also the only female director on our crew. But that’s another post for another time!
ELC, as an automated system, means we put computer codes in scripts prior to the show to get cameras, video, audio, and graphics relatively close to the way we want them to be on the air. There is a LOT (and I mean a LOT) of tweaking of those items when we’re live, however. Particularly camera shots. I have a 6 foot -something anchor and a barely 5 foot anchor on the same camera. That shot is not quite the same. 🙂
These are some super basic codes. I will post some niftier ones when I get a moment. Camera or video is on the far left, mics/other audio (music, video) in the center, and on the far right, which you can’t see here, are ways to fill the monitors in the studio.
I spent many years punching shows manually. We do still have a switcher in the booth, behind me to the left, but it has a tendency to make ELC cranky if we do much to it on the air. So…we don’t. I won’t pretend that I don’t miss my buttons, however!
We also have a full-on audio board to my right, which I have made use of during a show when a live shot mic level goes sideways or someone puts on a mic I don’t have coded. I had to ask for a longer headset cord to make it over to the end without ripping them off of my head.
Slightly off-kilter view of the full deal. I call this tip-toe cam.
There are two people in the booth during a show. A producer (on the left) and a director (on the right). Back in the day, they would have been joined by an audio operator, a graphics person, a prompter person, potentially a technical director, a video operator (although that was often in another room), and then camera operators and a floor director out in the studio. Some places still have some of those positions. We have ELC.
I hope you enjoyed the booth tour. I will try to get a few more tours up relatively soon. I have pics from out in the field, which I try to shadow every so often to stay on top of how crews are doing things these days. I have some studio pics. More codes. Seriously, follow me on Twitter if you like this stuff. I post pics there a lot! (@DirectorCarey) 2021 Carey note: I still post behind-the-scenes studio pics on Twitter from our student studio!
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