Stealth Interview Tactic with Phone & Mixing Pro with Crap Content

[code20photog]

I still think that too many people are holding onto the old notion that HD appointment television is how TV news will remain relevant. Spend some time with your interns, watch their habits, see how they consume video. Go to YouTube and see 420p clips with a million views. We're tailoring our product to a demographic that is fading into the sunset and the future viewers don't care about your pretty pictures.

 

[At the scene]

No I understand that the Dejero, TV U or Live U is easier especially when you do not have truck ops. Either I’m doing something wrong or my location sucks. Honestly I have success maybe 60% of the time at best. It freezes or drops out, the lip sync is off, signal strength is low, audio is low, sometimes it looks like somebody is pouring water on my lens as the live shot is going on.

I’ll never forget going live from Madison Square Garden, the team we were covering won I fired the Dejero up and ran on the court to capture the excitement live, followed the team into the locker room to show that to our audience. Proceeded to go live immediately after the locker room celebration scrambling to set up lights, tripod and ifb . I glance over at the box and the delay reads 2.2 sec delay. Well I am getting older and glasses are eminent the box actually read 22 sec delay. Can you imagine the fiasco that live shot was? OMG what a disaster!!! ( It really is a funny story but for another day) Since then I have frowned on using any cell packs. I just have had no luck with this new technology. Sat & Live trucks may take longer to set up but I will take it any day of the week.

 

[Run&Gun]

We've had decent luck with the ones one of my clients use. A producer told me a few days ago that he heard 93% success rate with them. They can be useful, but they're not perfect. My first outing with one was not fun, it froze in the middle of a live shot(network) and then continued to act up for a few hours after that. Had one completely die on a major event. A friend had one completely die and they had to ship another one to him. And then there's the "pushing water uphill" unreasonable expectations of wanting to go live when there are thousands of people around on their cell phones sending pictures, videos and texts. 'Ain't' gonna happen. You can not use these with any type of certainty at major, high-profile events. They know how much a sat truck costs to bring in. They know how much sat time costs to book. They know they're gonna get a shot that way. How much do they lose when they can't get the shot because they gambled with all of their live, on-air presence and content feed path on a cell phone? Because if you can't get a shot out, then there is absolutely no reason for your reporter, producer, and crew to be there. Theres SEVERAL thousand dollars down the drain just right there because you've already paid to travel them in and what they are being paid to work. I'd really like to see the translation of what not making slot and having a black hole at the network level is to actual dollars.

 

[SamG]

At The Scene-

IIRC, Dejero has a number of settings when it comes to latency... short (3 seconds), medium (7 seconds), long (11 seconds), and variable (depends on conditions). We've actually changed our long setting to 20 seconds and use it ONLY for feeds. We'll use short or medium for live shots. I don't see how anyone thinks variable would be a viable option for live shots.

I would also suggest looking at your boxes and see how many cellular transmitters it has. Our original ones had 4, once we went up to 6, it GREATLY improved our success rate. You can look at the home screen of the transmitter and see how many signal graphs are in the upper right.

One thing we've also done is, for big events (NCAA tournament), arrange for a hardwired network connection.

 

[At the scene]

Sam thanks! We have upgraded to 6 transmitters and yes the latency was set really high the day of the Madison Square Garden massacre. However just today our 5 pm live shot fine, edited and feed for 6 great. 6pm live shot dead why? no idea!! What changed from 5 to 6 just not sure. My colleague yesterday lip sync problem rebooted by shutting it down and restarted fine for about 5 minutes then he said the signal strength fluctuated from 100% - 20%. Just not reliable for us. Granted we are a sports network so as RUN said we do deal with a lot of fans using cell phones.