[BC] SB40

[Alan Kline]

------ At 11:25 AM 2/6/2006 -0500, The Most Honourable Scott Cason wrote: -------
>
>The only spot I found amusing was the streaker sheep in the Budweiser
>Clydesdale horse football game.  

That was the only spot I enjoyed, as well.

>It seems that our local ABC affiliate WHAS-TV, has a bunch of idiot viewers
>that can't operate their television sets.  WHAS ran a crawl every five
>minutes for the first quarter instructing people how to turn off the SAP
>channel on their receivers.  I came very close to turning off the game and
>watching a September 11th show my Tivo had recorded instead because of that
>annoyance.  Why can't stations hire master control switchers with a brain
>anymore?

Now wait a second, Scott--first, you blame the WHAS viewers for being too stupid
to turn off their SAP channel, then you ask why stations can't hire MCR ops
with a brain.  There's a contradiction there--you can't blame station personnel
for dumb viewers.

As to your question--it's darned hard to hire good young people to work in 
station operations these days for the same reason it's hard to hire good
maintenance people--broadcast companies won't pay the going rate for the
skills involved.

Yes, it's frustrating.  I've been doing MCR work for 21 years, among other
positions.  I've seen a few good people come and go--too often, go when they
find something in IT or multimedia that pays more.  I've also seen far too
many idiots who shouldn't be allowed to *watch* a television station, much
less operate one.  And contrary to popular opinion, automation requires a
*greater* skill set from an operator, not less.  

>Guys, I'm a diehard football fan.  The NFL has made it so not about the game
>over the past several years, I don't really care to watch NFL football
>anymore.

Agreed, and MLB has trashed baseball the same way, and the NBA, basketball.
It's all big business now, not sport.  The "Knothole Gang" is history.

>And I wonder how much of the audio problems we heard were because of the
>local affiliates not having the processing set up properly?

There's always that possibility, but since we've seen reports here from 
people in different markets saying the same thing, I suspect that that's
how it was mixed.  We don't do a great deal of processing, if any, on the Dolby
audio we get from CBS.  Initially, we had a few problems getting our 
encoder to switch properly from 2-channel to 5.1 and back, but once the
encoder was properly configured to handle the CBS metadata, no more
trouble.  I've also noticed that some 5.1 dramatic series seem to be
mixed differently from others.  "CSI", for example has tons of level
on the LFE channel.  Other 5.1 shows appear to have little or none.
Since we're not doing anything to change the encoding or processing
as we pass the audio, I'm guessing that's how the shows' audio post
mixers are doing their mixes.

Now, if you've never heard real 5.1, listen to the opening titles of "CSI"
some Thursday night, when The Who rips into the "Whoooo are you...who who, who who?"
If I cranked up the audio monitor in MCR as far as it could go, we'd get complaints 
from the apartments across the street. We use a Videotek rasterizer for monitoring
levels on our DTV, but it's not always necessary...with a steel-plate floor, the
subwoofer sitting on it, and the comfy moccasins I usually wear when I'm switching,
I can monitor the LFE just by putting my feet on the floor... ;-)

ak