While 65,000 people on the ground and more than 6.7 million viewers were watching daredevil Nik Wallenda walk untethered across a tightrope over the city of Chicago, the director of technical operations for NBC’s field and production operations had his mind on technical things.
5 comments:
This was a fascinating article. First of all, I did not even know this event was happening. I remember when this occurred over the Grand Canyon, but this time around the event seemed much less publicized. It was interesting to hear about all of the prep work that goes into this screening. As a viewer, you aren't thinking about how they are videotaping the tight roper. Instead, you are concentrated fully on him walking 300 feet over the skyscrapers of Chicago. The technology that goes into this is much more thought out than anyone would ever imagine, but it actually makes a ton of sense. When working on live events like this, it must be thought out very carefully the method in which it will be taped. If this company had decided to use a helicopter or a drone, it would have hugely impacted the ability for Nik to tight rope. I wonder that plans they had in case Nik did indeed fall off the tight rope. I would be super interested to hear about their planned protocol if this were to happen.
This is such an amazing perspective on this event! When you're watching something like this, you don't always think about the amount of effort that goes into the recording process. And with the higher expectations of viewers nowadays, it becomes more and more difficult to create a satisfying rig.
I love being able to hear about the process of this behind the scenes work of something that isn't strictly designated as "theater". It shows just how much effort goes into these seemingly effortless things.
I watched this event occur on a live stream, I was so nervous and scared seeing this man put his life in harms way. There were so many camera angles that were video taping the event including a camera on the actual tight roper. I never really thought about how much actually went into taping these events and attractions. Now, knowing that they have the technology for this, we can go to great lengths to advance it and perfect it further.
The amount of gear it takes to make a broadcast event like that happen is pretty astounding. The logistics involved in making it happen are just as impressive. They compared this one to the event a year ago at the Grand Canyon and even though it was a similar event the challenges are very different. How do you set up this much equipment and infrastructure on existing infrastructure without damaging or screwing anything up especially considering that they had to set up on three different rooftops. The reliance on fiber is also really interesting and shows how important developing technology is especially considering that they relied solely on fiber with no backup system in place and that everything worked perfectly. The amount of planning that goes on both before and during the set up of this kind of event is just so impressive.
I did not watch this event live on tv, because I was probably at school working. So I had heard about it at least a week before and knew of the event. Even so I never spent the time to think all about the intricacies of setting up everything. This article is amazing in describing just everything that went on. Run the thousands of feet of fiber to lifting equipment with helicopters and so on. I thought the article did a good job of describing all of the logistical planning that went into moving all of the equipment. One of the most impressive things to me was just lifting the wire by hand the height of the building, some 700 feet. That is just a lot of work. Even though I am in production side of theatre, I still often forget about the production side of everything else. Just very impressive.
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