One Long and Tiring Week

The military is always on schedule - even when it rains. For the last 2 weeks, we've been either cancelled or delayed due to rain, but the military will do it's flyover on time. Last week we had no flyover on the actual race day - because they flew over exactly on time the day before. This week, they flew over - on time - but 3 hours before the actual National Anthem - because of the rain delay.


I'm now sitting in the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania airport waiting on my plane. It was an incredibly long week in Pocono. Since Nascar Cup racing switched over to TNT broadcasting from Fox for the following 6 weeks we had to make all of our gadgets and services talk to all of theirs. This is no small feat. In fact, in Daytona (during the first race of the year), we allow for 3 weeks for everything to get all worked out. In this case, we allowed only the normal amount of time between races.

As can be imagined, it didn't go smoothly and we all had to put in some long days to make it happen. For the most part, the viewer at home wouldn't notice the difference, but there was much scrambling behind the scenes to make it happen. Hopefully, this coming week's race will be smoother.

The broadcast booth for TNT


For my part, I've been running the 3D application for the last 3 weeks (now called Raceview with TNT). It continues to be a mixed blessing. It's really cool to be on the development team of a new product like this, but the funding for development of hte program has been cut off, so we're working with a 'not quite finished' application that I compare to digging a deep hole with a spoon - you can do it - but there are cetainly easier ways.

During this week's show, I made air 3 or 4 times. I made a segment from last year's race for the pregame show. I didn't see the segment on air, but was told it came out well. During the race delay, the director had me 'fly' around the entire track. This is not an easy thing to do on air. It's not that hard to mess it up, but the director had the idea at the last minute and just 'called' for it, so I did it and it came out well. I also did a replay of a wreck that I'm sure looked a little bad to the viewer. The director called for the replay (which I had built during the commercial) and so I started "rolling' it. He then told the TD (technical director ) to "dissolve" to 3D and the TD didn't. He kept callingfor it and by the time the TD disssolved to 3D, the clip was half over and so I restarted it. The restart showed up on live TV, for which the director really got mad at the TD, but told us (me) we did a good job.

With the rain delay of 3 hours, we had to break down all of our equipment in the dark with headlamps on. This track in Pocono is ancient and hasn't been upgraded to keep up with the modern times. It has NO lights whatsoever and it is located in the middle of the woods. There is nothing but forest around and so when it gets dark - it really gets dark. We all are hoping we didn't leave some thousand dollar piece of equipment laying out in the woods.
We usually work in teams of 2 when heading out into the field. Here is a photo of Clyde 'registering' camera 5. We alternate back and forth between the 2 of us as to who climbs the tower and regges the camera.


This coming week is a race in Michigan. I don't know much about it - except that I get to go home next monday. I can't wait for that!!

4 races in a row and I have only been home for 1 day in the last 3 weeks.