Folks never in live broadcasting generally have no idea how incredibly chaotic it can be leading up to the last minutes and in some cases even last seconds before air in radio and television. Yet somehow at zero it always seems to sound and look fine.
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@lauren I've gotten a teeny tiny taste of that with many live radio (and a few live TV) interviews. Even remotely, the level of chaos before the interview starts is impressive. And I've never yet had a host/producer/tech drop my interview, even on the tiniest radio stations. Truly impressive work. (I'm glad it's not my work, that sounds stressful!)
@sundogplanets New tech can sometimes even add complications. Most interviews originally were done by phone or ISDN (the latter now completely defunct), but now Zoom is common for the audio feeds, even though for radio the video aspect is usually unnecessary.
@lauren @sundogplanets I looked at Jistsi as an alternative to Zoom, Teams, Meet ..
@pinhman @sundogplanets An advantage of Zoom is that pretty much everyone has it installed already these days.
@lauren You ought to see what happens backstage during a theatrical show.
I really enjoyed holding 20 actors, 15 crew, 200 props, 400 lights with 1000 light cues, and 300 sound cues together against the onslaught of Murphy's Law - and doing it eight times a week.
We had the luxury of being able to hold the house for a few minutes at the start, but once we heard "Cue one - Go!" there was no turning back.
(The closest I ever got to stopping a performance was when it appeared that we had a fire on stage. I was in full "get ready inform the audience, and put them into evacuate" mode when the ASM said that it was just a smoke machine that had gone nutz.)
@karlauerbach I can imagine! Hell, they even parodied the harried stage manager in "Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol" (no coincidence that the songs were written by an award winning Broadway team). The thing about live network radio or TV is that you have absolutely no margin for error when you start, during breaks, or when you end. The show "clock" segmentation is absolutely the law, and when you have hundreds or more stations tied in all depending on to the second accuracy for their own breaks and spots and IDs and such, you better get it right!
@lauren I am in awe of people in the control booth - whether TV, radio, or theatrical - who can stitch together a collapsing show.
Not only is there a lot of talent there in the booth (and among the crew), but there is a kind of fearlessness that is amazing.
I remember one stage manager in a complex musical (Into The Woods) who had to re-sequence multiple scenes in real time because an actor took an critical prop offstage on the wrong side.
We once did a staged reading about a collapsing show from the crew's point of view - it had things like the sheriff showing up to Hamlet, thinking a murder had been committed. And the union guy was madly skimming the rules to see whether it was ok to kill the reviewer by dropping a light on him. It was fun - and afterwards the script got lost!!
@karlauerbach Boo on lost script! Boo! One thing we do to try provide a bit of tolerance is use bumper music for network in and out points. So the show proper (host intro) starts exactly six minutes after the hour (that six minutes is for stations to do local news, etc.) but at 05:20 the network links in and the show bumper music starts (which has been the same for the many decades the show has been on the air). If you listen to individual stations during that bumper time, they're usually doing local announcements and promos and such over the music. Then maybe five seconds before 06:00 exactly the stations go quiet, host intro begins over the music at about 06:02, the music is faded down, and "the show must go on!"
@lauren The trick is being sure, amid all the chaos, about what's going to happen in those first few seconds.
@mrowe I've never seen an actual miss. But man, I've seen some that were close, like with the IFB going to dial tone in my ear less than a minute before air and other scary stuff. Not being able to hear the director or program feed on a live network interview is seriously scary. For my regular weekly live radio segments I'm hooked into master control about half hour before air these days.
