Live from Dallas

Last week we completed our first LiveU enabled SMT.

One of our clients asked us to produce a live Satellite Media Tour from the W Hotel in Dallas as part of the promotion for the Big 3 Basketball game that was to take place the day after the tour. For those who don’t know, Big 3 was co-founded by Ice Cube and airs live on Fox Sports, in the course of 5 hour Satellite window, we were going to hit about 30 TV, radio and internet based stations, most of them being Fox local channels in major markets across the country. Needless to say, the stakes were high and absolutely nothing could go wrong.

We decided to break the production support up into two teams:

The production team in the field consisted of myself (TD/Tech Manager), Bob (Stage Manager), Roger (DoP) and Jared (audio). We took our normal rack mounted flight pack out with a couple of additions to help make this run smoothly, along with our LiveU, lighting and audio gear, and two cameras – The Sony F3, with the Ex3 on standby as a backup should something fail critically.

A view of our “control room” setup in the hotel in Dallas.

You can get a glimpse of our “control room” setup in this picture. I had three laptops up, the one on the left was controlling our rack-mounted switcher, the center one gave me network control of our KiPro recorder (mounted in the audio rack out of frame) as well as where I logged into LiveU’s web interface to monitor and set up our transmission (if you look closely you can see the LiveU unit behind that computer), and the one on the right was streaming a 720 resolution version of the feed to a private YouTube link so the team in Houston could see what we were doing.

On that note, the Houston team consisted of John, Kathi and Marty, coordinating with the various stations, sending us their IFB feeds and routing our return audio via duplex as needed. The hotel had provided us with two phone lines, one was used for coordination and the other was our IFB line.

I used the switcher to put a graphic slate up identifying the next station, and then from there into the LiveU in full HD – no need for a satellite truck. Our signal then went to our uplink partner who recieved the LiveU signal and put it up on the satellite, from there it was pretty much like any other SMT, we just weren’t in our studios in Houston or having to find a spot for a sat truck to be parked outside the hotel.

With a couple minor exceptions, everything went smoothly. Our signal was rock solid for the roughly six hours we had our signal up, and even with the extra hop from the LiveU to the Satellite, we only had about 3 seconds delay from our “studio” through to the local broadcast stations – most of that being in the Satellite transmission. Afterward we shut everything down and were out of the hotel a couple hours later and on the road back to Houston. It was an exhausting whirlwind of a shoot, but a great experience and solid proof of the LiveU’s reliability.

Check out a couple of the hits from this shoot below, and thank you for reading.

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Good Day LA – Fox 11 – Los Angeles:

First Coast News: