Sports TV Behind the Scenes: University of Florida Volleyball
Over the last few days I've been up in Gainesville to work a few games for the SEC Network. I worked with one of my usual clients for the two-game stretch of SEC volleyball action that sandwiched the gridiron battle royale between LSU and UF Saturday.
While I certainly don't follow volleyball, it's hard not to learn a few things about the conferences, players and such when working games. Florida has been known to have a good squad for years now and the SEC conference has some good competition just like most other SEC sports. Our first scheduled game to cover was the Friday matchup with another undefeated SEC team Texas A&M.
I was working as an A-1 for these games which basically means I'm the lead audio engineer. I'm responsible for building and designing the audio setup for this particular arena. I also mix the games live for TV and create several specific sub-mixes that are distributed to various radio broadcasts and streams. Normally games go somewhat smoothly, however Murphy's Law showed it's ugly head early on Day 1.
I was under the assumption I would be working in a production truck I had already mixed several shows in. I was surprised to see a brand-spanking new production vehicle early Friday morning. After shooting the shit with the truck engineers I learned this production vehicle was just pieced together the previous week and this would be it's first show, not to mention an audio console I've never used before.
I didn't really have time to snap any pictures during the show Friday because we were busy figuring out and fixing all the little technical quirks in the new truck. I won't bore you with the details...BUT I will share a good laugh with you!
What you are looking at above is one of our truck engineers crawling inside through a carefully removed patch panel. About 30 minutes before that happened, I closed the doors to the back of the truck which is where my audio booth is. Apparently the locking mechanism on the door broke and we were unable to get back in...not like you need to hear anything when you watch sports on TV, right? I felt bad until I was told they had recently paid to repair the same thing on this vehicle before outfitting it with all the new equipment.
A locksmith was called and would take waaaay too long. We were going LIVE in less than an hour! We ended up removing the patch panel so he could squeeze through to the booth in the back and jimmy open the door. We literally removed the screws from the door hinge and tried prying the door open with crowbars with no success before this happened! The whole crew was dying laughing watching this.
We got in and I barely had time to situate myself and do final mic checks before game time. We limped into the production yet pulled it off like pros, but if you saw the process you'd likely feel differently.
Florida won against another undefeated SEC team in Texas A&M and they went the full 5 sets.
Flash-forward to Sunday for another SEC showdown bringing in my Georgia Bulldogs. After working most of the wrinkles out of the production process Friday, Sunday felt like a piece of cake.
I arrived early and so did my audio assistants. We had everything built again and tested before the camera crew even showed up. Here's a look at our booth setup courtside.
When it comes to audio, I am responsible for the booth setup (above) consisting of the three announcer consoles plus several comm lines set for the stage manager, time-out coordinator, two statisticians, two audio party lines for my assistants on either side of the court, camera comms and more. It's a TON of people coordinating over comms to pull off the broadcast, here's a peek at the comm console in my audio booth.
The top panel is for all comms, the below piece of gear is basically a router for my comm system and it controls which cams or feeds I see in my monitor.
Thankfully our Sunday game went off with no errors on the audio side...cameras took a minute to settle in...
Georgia ending up bringing some serious competition. Honestly, when I'm working games I'm cheering for whichever team could end the game first. I'm a Georgia fan, so it's a bit sacrilegious to be in the UF Swamp...let alone cheer for them. Rivalries and team support is pushed aside when working. We want to get in, get a good show out, break down and flee the scene as soon as possible.
I did enjoy learning yet another board, figuring out digital consoles can be fun and sometimes frustrating. Thankfully I had a local audio production legend as my A-2, I will ask for him whenever he's available when I'm in that part of the state!
Thanks for stopping by!
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until next time...
"What does this button do, I wonder... ?" Nice photos, especially that last one with the focal drop-off.
So... Do you get to choose what pops up on the big screen out there? Could you slip in a funny cat video? lol
lol, no the jumbo tron is usually controlled in-house. I'm always tempted to add strange sound fx into the mix. If I can make a few people spin their head around looking for the sound source I've done my job
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