Total Communications
Start of 3rd Quarter . . .
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Monday, June 2, 1986 Enclosed is a rose for your birthday. Now that we're 39, we stop counting, right? |
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Last week I made a quick trip to New York, where our company was supplying TV facilities for the Tony Awards. The producers of the telecast wanted a certain size of Helvetica Bold lettering surrounded by flashing "marquee lights," like this. |
However,
they wanted a double oval of dots that twinkle between
yellow and white. I had already designed the double oval for
them, sending the necessary data on a floppy disk. But the
Chyron operator they had hired in New York didn't know how to convert
letters to non-standard sizes, nor did he know how to animate the
marquee effect.
Our company had assured the producers that our equipment could give them what they wanted, so at 9:15 Thursday morning I got a call from my boss. At 1:15 I was on a plane to New York. At 3:15 I was in Times Square at the Minskoff Theatre, 200 West 45th Street. Inside our TV truck, I converted the Helvetica Bold font, showed the operator how to do the flashing dots, and recorded some graphics on disk. And by 6:30 I was on my way back home.
The show aired Sunday night on CBS. This was the first time any of my work had gotten on one of the Big Three networks (although I have been on smaller networks like USA and ESPN). And the episode gave my ego a boost. I know there are dozens of people in the country who could have done what I did, but it's still nice to get a call saying "We're in New York, doing a big live national telecast on Broadway for CBS, and we've got a problem, and you're the only one who can solve it!"
I hope folks are reminding you this week of how important you are.
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Pixel by Pixel The Chyron character generators that I was using during the 1980s (models 4000 through 4200) could capture artwork from a camera and turn it into a logo. This was a special symbol, such as a sponsor's trademark, that could be typed onto a page like any other character. Unfortunately, the analog-to-digital conversion usually didn't work very well, resulting in such defects as ragged edges or stray pixels in solid-color areas. So a "logo trim" program allowed the operator to go in and repair the captured video, pixel by pixel — a tedious process, of course. It occurred to me that if most of the pixels had to be repaired, it would not be that much more effort to do all of the pixels. I made an enlarged printout of the artwork, drew grid lines on it, and transferred its contours to a sheet of graph paper. Each square on the graph paper represented three pixels on the Chyron. Then I would go into the "logo trim" program and, starting from a blank page, reproduce my graph-paper layout, line by line and pixel by pixel.
I kept trying new possibilities. Computers had recently become capable of "morphing" one image into another, for example distorting George Washington's face until it became Abraham Lincoln's face. I decided to see whether I could do a simple morph with my pixel-by-pixel method. Using a full sheet of graph paper for each frame, I plotted the TCS logo and the Penn State Nittany Lions logo and marked certain key points. For each of three intermediate frames, I moved each key point one-quarter of the distance from its initial to its final position. With colors added, the results are on the left. I would have needed at least twice as many frames for smooth animation; each frame would have become a character, and the Chyron would display the characters in quick succession. But this experiment never got beyond the graph-paper stage. |
Friday, August 8, 1986 (commercial copy)
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For the 1986 season and continuing through 1987, I became the producer of our Penn State football shows. That might sound like a more important position than it really was. I was a mid-level manager, writing scripts and formats and making such decisions as whether we should include a particular play in the highlights of that week's game. Above me, an executive producer was hiring announcers and deciding what sort of features should be included in the shows, and a coordinating producer was making arrangements for equipment and crews and travel. And all these decisions were turned into reality by a number of other TCS staffers. Penn State football took a lot of work, on practically a year-round basis. By 1986 many of the games were on live network television, and we could use their video feed. For the other games, we set up our own cameras.
First we'd cut the game down to about 30 minutes of action and package it with commercials and features in a one-hour highlights show that many stations aired the next day, Sunday. It was not convenient for stations in certain markets to air our one-hour show, but they could clear half an hour. So Dennis Galloway re-edited the show to 30 minutes for them, including about seven minutes of action. Then in midweek we'd interview Joe Paterno for a half-hour coach's show called Paterno, which included some highlights from the previous game. This routine of highlights shows and Paterno shows continued throughout the season. If Penn State had a bye week, we still felt we owed the stations a program, so we'd pare the highlights some more to come up with a season-to-date show for that week, including just a few minutes of each game. Once the season was finished, we kept on going. There were shows reviewing the regular season, previewing the bowl game, reviewing the bowl game, and reviewing the entire season, with a corresponding Paterno for each. Then over the summer we'd add some new material to the entire-season show to make the first show for our next season, which would air six days before the opening game. An outstanding play in Game 3 might thus be seen in six one-hour shows and several Paterno shows by the time we were done with the year. And then we started thinking about other ways of wringing revenue from this footage, including multi-volume home videos covering as much as a decade. We got sick of seeing some of these plays.
And we still weren't done. On top of all this, Penn State won the 1986 national championship, defeating Miami in the Fiesta Bowl on January 2, 1987. We went on an editing frenzy. We put together special shows for broadcast syndication, reformatted them to air on ESPN, and reformatted them again for the home video market. There would be two preseason shows in August 1987, one "National Championship Show" celebrating 1986 and the other doing the same but also looking ahead. And we also put all of this into a three-hour extravaganza for home video called "The Hundredth Year." |
Tuesday, October 7, 1986
As we discussed last week, I'd like to plan on Thursday, October 16 (prior to the Syracuse game) as a day when Jack Sedlak and I could use the Hitachi machines in the field shop Media Center to put together the highlights of the first five games for our post-season shows.
Not only would this give us better technical quality than editing from 3/4" cassettes, it should be rather efficient because we already have the time-code numbers of the plays we want to use.
One bed will be for the post-season Paterno show, the pre-bowl one-hour show, and the 1987 pre-season show. It will consist of silent footage at about one minute per game (four plays).
The other will be for the post-season one-hour show and the home-video year in review. It will consist of about two minutes of footage per game (eight plays), with Stan's play-by-play audio on a couple of the plays. In addition, we'll add about thirty seconds of Joe's remarks from the following week's Paterno show.
By the end of the season, the first bed will be in two parts (six games and five games), or about 6 minutes each. The second bed will be in four parts (three games each), of about 7½ minutes each.
We'll need a one-hour tape (or at least 45 minutes) to build these beds.
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Most TV crews working away from home get a per diem allowance (around $40 a day) to defray the cost of their meals. We didn't. Instead, we received these Long John Silver's certificates, which our company obtained very cheaply because Long John's was a sponsor. Don't like seafood? Too bad. |
Saturday, October 25, 1986
Detailed schedule for Penn State at Alabama
This particular show was not edited at the site of the game. We sent our announcers with a producer and a camera to Tuscaloosa, but our production truck stayed in the field shop in Pittsburgh. We had constructed a "media center" in the field shop, where two VTRs recorded ABC's feed of the game with our announcers on the audio track. When each reel was finished, we took them to the production truck, where (in order to meet our deadlines) we started editing at our usual 4:30 pm even though the game was only in the second quarter. We left space so that later we could insert the announcers introducing the game and each quarter.
My crew sometimes called me a "slave driver" because as soon as one edit was made, I was giving instructions for the next one. But as this schedule shows, we had to keep moving.
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MEDIA CENTER |
TRUCK |
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2:00 |
Pre-production: Edit open, add shot to scouting report |
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3:15 |
Start recording first reel in Media Center |
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4:00 |
Truck engineers leave |
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4:10 |
Second quarter begins; start recording second reel |
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4:20 |
When all first-quarter edit cues have been sent, remove first reel and send to truck |
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4:30 |
Start editing first quarter |
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5:10 |
When all second-quarter edit cues have been sent, remove second reel and send to truck |
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5:20 |
Third quarter begins; start recording third reel |
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5:30 |
Start editing second quarter |
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6:10 |
Fourth quarter begins; start recording fourth reel |
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6:20 |
When all third-quarter edit cues have been sent, remove third reel and send to truck |
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6:30 |
Jan Stief arrives |
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6:40 |
Add the pre-edited halftime "Paterno Way" interview to the show |
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6:50 |
Start editing third quarter |
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7:10 |
Game over; remove fourth reel and send to truck |
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7:20 |
On fifth reel, record ENG feeds of announcers on camera (postgame comments, lead to each quarter) |
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7:40 |
Remove fifth reel and send to truck |
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7:50 |
Start editing fourth quarter |
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8:00 |
Go for pizza |
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8:20 |
Reconfigure Media Center for making dubs |
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8:45 |
PIZZA BREAK |
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9:00 |
Edit Defensive Player of Game |
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9:30 |
Edit Offensive Player of Game |
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10:00 |
Edit Scouting Report and close |
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10:15 |
Re-insert quarter leads into show |
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10:30 |
Re-edit open including announcers to dub reel |
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10:45 |
Re-insert open into show |
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11:00 |
Pack up truck |
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11:05 |
Start making dubs |
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12:15 |
Start second set of dubs |
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1:20 |
Make special 3/4" dub for Dean Jordan |
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1:45 |
Out |
Autumn, 1986
Notes to Chyron operators for Raycom college basketball telecasts:
In
order to keep the Raycom "look" consistent, please adhere
to this style unless you get subsequent instructions from
Charlotte. There were midseason changes last year, and
different dialects developed in various conferences. The style
described here is basically the one in use at the Metro Conference Tournament
in March, 1986; we'd like to use it in all conferences this season.
Font
6: Your choice of team logos.
Font
id 16 (autoload 1): Pac-10 Conference
Font
id 24 (autoload 2): Metro Conference
Font
id 28 (autoload 3): Big 8 Conference
Font
id 34 (autoload 4): Southwest Conference
The
numbers in font 3 have been adjusted so that they're all the same
width, making it easier to line up scores and stats with each
other. Two other characters in this font are also that same
width: @ is a leading one, and * is a leading space.
If you type *9 over 29, the nines will line up. If you type 19
over 29, the nines will line up, but the space between the 1 and the
9 will appear too great; so type @9 instead of 19.
If you don't already have a favorite layout, you can use the one on our message disk. It's a little quirky, but it is fast. The statistician tells you, "Foul on 23 white, his fourth"; you enter 235 read 4 read, and you have it on the screen.
We put player names at address XNNT, where
X
is 0 for class/height/weight/position/average, or
1 for high school/home town
NN
is the uniform number
T
is 0 for the visiting team, or
5 for the home team (usually wearing white)
In rare cases, a player wears 0 or 00. But we don't want to record him at 0000 or 0005; those low addresses are too valuable for autodisplays. So pretend he's really wearing the number 2.
For convenience, pretend the coach is wearing the number 56. (College players are not allowed to wear digits higher than 5, because a referee's hand has only five fingers.)
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Incidentally, on the halftime stats panels, HALFTIME STATS appears to be on two rows, one above the other; but the one-piece logos require us to put everything on one row. The trick is to type HSATLAFTTSIME, shift every other character down, and then shift all the characters left. |
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You can change the palette as needed for team logos, but the standard colors should be Red 700, Blue 072, Cyan 275, Yellow 707, White 777. These are referred to as R, B, C, Y, and W in the printed examples that follow; so 2W/ will mean font 2, white, italic.
Page 2125:
1C
METRO CONFERENCE
4R
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3YW/
MEMPHIS
STATE
0 [larger, italic]
3YW/
LOUISVILLE
0
1Y
1st Half
Team in 3Y/ and points in 3W/.
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I wrote a program for my TRS-80 Model 100 mini-laptop computer that I called "Avprod." It was a specialized spreadsheet that allowed me to adjust SEGment times and TOTal running times to make the show come out to the correct length. I even used this program to track live shows like the Miss Ohio and Miss New York pageants; in the former, it became obvious that we were gradually falling behind schedule, and eventually the decision had to be made to cut a production number. But mostly I used it for editing sessions. Here's what I calculated the night before the November 26, 1986, taping of Paterno.
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I wrote another little program to allow me to print out a script in three columns, for video, running time, and audio. Here's the middle segment of that November 26 show, as read by Paterno host Bill Wilson.
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While a Penn State game was being played, we kept a log so that later we could see at a glance what should be included in our condensed highlights version: plays, replays, color shots. I wrote a program to do this on my computer, as well.
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Sunday, February 1, 1987
I talked Thursday with Bob Hunter, our resident expert on the engineering of systems to encode home video cassettes so they can't be copied.
He reports that so far he's seen demonstrations of four such systems, but has been satisfied with none of them.
The system that Bob came closest to liking adds to the audio a very loud tone that is very high-pitched, so high (18 kHz) that it can be heard only by the family dog — or by a second VCR that's trying to record a copy. This VCR adjusts to the tone by turning down its volume, which of course also turns down the volume on the real program audio to a point where it can't be heard on the copy.
Any copy-protection scheme can be defeated, at least in theory. Most of the rest of them rely not on audio tones but on video signals to confuse the second VCR; devices on the market called "video stabilizers" are designed to remove the extra signals.
Such products are necessary because not only can copy-protected tapes not be copied, they often cannot be viewed. The non-standard signals that are designed to confuse copying VCRs also are capable of confusing some TV sets, resulting in unwatchable pictures. Letters in Video Review tell of customers who have returned to the store to exchange movie cassettes numerous times until they could get a cassette they could watch, usually a version that was not copy-protected.
Bob suggests that the problem is so bad that copy protection might gain us less in increased sales than it would cost us in postage for mailing non-encoded replacement cassettes to complaining customers.
Wednesday, February 4, 1987
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Contrary to our fears Monday [when the national champion Penn State football team visited Washington, D.C.], we do have good footage of the White House event. There are sufficient cutaway shots to edit this footage into various packages. The technical quality is excellent. |
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. . End of
3rd
Quarter
