August 19, 2020

 


I have two games today to broadcast.  At 1:30 pm it is Toronto against Brooklyn then at 6:30pm Boston entertains Philly.  I like working the early games.  The games that start at 9:00 pm, well that is just too late in my book.  Sure, we have to concern ourselves with the west coast viewers and make sure they have a game somewhere near prime time, but 9:00 pm is late.

 

Our call time was 8:30 am. People often ask me why we need to get there five hours before tipoff, especially if everything is set up.  Well, sometimes I ask myself that same question.  But here in the bubble, things are not the same as under normal circumstances. 

 

Because of the incredible technical challenges with sharing equipment, having one network run operations one way, while the other network operates another way, every possibility of failure must be examined. From my point of view I am confident as I provide maintenance on my camera prior to the broadcast that all is fine, but it is what happens between my camera and all the electronics in between that results in the final broadcast that must be checked and rechecked, and then checked again before we hit air.  Plus we need to feed warmups to the various outlets taking our feed, build packages for our show, and rehearse show content.  Plus, we need to eat.

 

It used to be the camera feeds only fed the truck in which the broadcast was originating.  Nowadays a multitude of news gathering companies have access to whatever we shoot.  This usually results with us being on camera much earlier than expected, and discipline with what we capture with our cameras.  There really isn’t much of an issue with the bubble games being selective in our shooting as there are no fans allowed so we are constantly training our lenses on the players.  But when there are fans, sometimes they can be a bit distracting and inviting if you know what I mean.  And with today’s emphasis on political correctness and certain social movements it is best we keep our cameras facing the court.

 

The Raptors had little difficulty taking a two games to zero lead in this matchup with the Nets.  Brooklyn stayed with them for a while but didn’t have the athletes to claim victory.  From a technical standpoint, the lag time with the virtual fans had been corrected.  Early on during the restart there was a significant time differential in the transmission time of the fans being displayed on the screens throughout each arena.  Now the imagery is pretty much real time.  We do a promo for Michelob Ultra once per half and it involves shooting the LED screens that show the fans watching the game virtually while inserting a graphic over the various shots along with the announcers voicing the product.  The fans react immediately when they see themselves whereas before they wouldn’t react until we were completely off the shot of them.  We keep improving day by day I tell ya!

 

Before the second game our director Howie Singer, who is a huge music buff, read us a note he received from the bass player of the band “Lettuce.”  I have never heard of Lettuce.  I do not know what kind of music they play but they are definitely a band because I looked them up.  Anyway, the note read “Howie, just wanted to thank you and all the people you work with for bringing these games into our homes.  We live in an odd world right now and the work that you guys are doing provides a much needed escape from our fucked up reality.  Just want to thank you and everyone else that is involved…” 

 

Howie is good friends with the members of this band and I thought it was pretty cool of the bass player to take the time to send the text.  We don’t usually think of what we do as providing comfort or an escape but in this case it did.  That was nice and it was appreciated by everyone on headsets.

 

Boston and Philly was over by the middle of the second quarter. Ever since Ben Simmons went down with a kneecap injury that ended his season, the 76ers have not been able to regroup and play effectively against other teams.  Joel Embiid played much better this game than he did last time we saw him, but Boston has too many weapons.  They lost one of their high scorers Gordon Hayward to an ankle injury last game but they have a very strong bench to make up for his loss.  All the highlights shown after this game were from our tight camera located in the yellow zone.  Basically it was a tight shot of Embiid on the bench with his head buried in his jersey absorbing yet another Philadelphia loss.  The talk is the coach Brett Brown will be let go after they are eliminated but it is no fault of his that players go down with injuries.

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