Common Goal

To capture footage for Farm Aid, a concert to raise awareness and funds for farm families, Lyn Noland operates a Sony HDC-1000 camera mounted on a J.L. Fischer Model 10 dolly that rolls along 150ft. of track.

“If the broadcast isn't going out to 20 million people, you haven't directed live television.” So starts my interview with veteran television director Lawrence (Larry) Jordan — who, in a few hours, will be calling the shots at the 23rd annual Farm Aid musical extravaganza and fundraiser. A team numbering in the hundreds has gathered in Mansfield, Mass., for the 7-hour live telecast, which will be viewed by millions on DirecTV Entertainment's 101 Network as well as online at www.farmaid.org. Music superstars Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert in 1985. Dave Matthews joined the Farm Aid board of directors in 2001. Their goal from the start was to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to drum up funds to keep farm families operating. Each year, top-name performers as well as the next generation of hit makers donate their musical talents for the cause. It's an awesome undertaking. According to the organization, Farm Aid stages “America's longest-running annual concert event that unites farmers, artists, consumers, and concerned citizens to build a powerful movement for good food from family farms.”

“Being live is my favorite part of the job,” Jordan says. “Live television is the greatest rush I know. It's like flying a 747 down the Grand Canyon without any wings.”

Today's concert is really a 10-hour broadcast from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m., although the 101 Network will only be live from 4 p.m. on. During the first three hours, performances and interviews will be banked for playback later during the live portion of the telecast.

Jeremy Vicente uses a Sony HDC-950 to capture stage-side footage.

“My favorite part of the job is bringing great music — and, in this case, Farm Aid's message — to a broad audience,” says Executive Producer Albert Spevak, whose Los Angeles-based company Ambassador Entertainment is producing the broadcast for DirecTV. “My mission is to bring music and performance on as high a quality level as possible to the audience and really connect viewers and the performance as closely as possible.”

To achieve this goal, Spevak hired New York producers Philip Hack and Robert Katz to oversee the broadcast. Besides being in charge of hiring crew and production equipment, Hack describes his job as being in charge of the overall chaos. “The nature of the show is unpredictable,” Hack says. “Everything is changing up to the last minute. Moments before the show, we lost our main camera position for talent, so we had to rethink our entire host coverage.”

Katz had three weeks to prep the show, and on the day of the telecast, his presence is everywhere — dashing from the large amphitheater to the production truck to the interview set, which sports a Southwestern motif. “Let's lose a couple of bales of straw,” he tells set designer Deb Cutler. In a flash, they're gone. He also has to make sure his on-camera talent — Bob Costas, Carson Daly, Budd Mishkin, and Robin Dorian — are at the right place at the right time.

A Sony HDC-950 is trained on Bob Costas, one of four cohosts including Carson Daly, Budd Mishkin, and Robin Dorian.

Everyone loves working on this production, according to Katz. “Farm Aid is a labor of love,” he says. “An enormous amount of work, but you feel so good about doing it. When so many great artists come together for the right reasons, it feels great to be part of it.”

One of the coolest members of the crew is first assistant director, Sandra Restrepo of New York. Just back from the Olympics in China, Restrepo's job is to keep everyone calm, the ship on a steady keel, while making sure everyone is on the same page. Although the show's rundown has been locked for three days, it keeps changing hourly — even up to and during the live performance.

“At the last moment, the producers may want to throw it to Bob Costas because cohost Carson Daly's guest hasn't shown up. Or we may have to fill at the last minute because a band is having technical difficulties,” she says in a calm, even tone. “It's all about keeping the plane flying.” Another reference to airplanes and concerts. She also advises against drinking too much water or latte during a 10-hour broadcast, for obvious reasons.

Executive Director Albert Spevak, whose Los Angeles-based company Ambassador Entertainment is producing the broadcast for DirecTV, talks with Daly.

As with any live concert, getting bands on and off the stage is time-consuming. Spevak fills the dead zone with performances from earlier in day, Farm Aid awareness pitches, and prerecorded segments. An ENG crew has been on the grounds since the early morning with a Sony PMW-EX3 gathering material for these 1-minute-to-3-minutes cut-ins.

The EX3 has two memory card slots, which means with a pair of 16GB SxS Pro memory cards, it can record up to 140 minutes of HD footage. With little time to spare between recording, editing, and playback, it's an ideal solution for high-speed, on-the-run production. (Read more about the EX3 on p. 18 of this issue.)

The camera crew has lots of toys to play with, including 12 high-definition cameras for the live feed. Two Sony HDC-900s are mounted on Chapman/Leonard cranes, one HDC-950 is on a 24ft. Stanton Video Services Jimmy Jib, and two HDC-1000s are on J.L. Fischer Model 10 dollies that roll on 150ft. of track just above the expensive seats. The other 950s are hard-mounted or handheld.

The camera operators are a mixture of sports and music shooters, all veterans of the game and most of whom Jordan has worked with before during his 25-year career shooting concerts.

Speaking to one of 15 camera people on the shoot, I wanted to know what it takes to get good enough to get your name called for a high-profile music concert such as Farm Aid. “It takes practice, practice, practice,” says camera operator Lyn Noland, one of the few women on the technical crew. “It's like playing an instrument. The more you play it, the better you are.” She has been shooting for 25 years and she's very good, often getting the extremely prestigious close-up camera angles. Today, she's riding a Model 10 dolly. It's not a bad seat, 30 rows up from center stage.

Catching all the footage are two 6-channel EVS Group hard-disk recorders in the All Mobile Video Resolution multiformat production truck. It's almost a day off for EVS operators Dan Phipps and Jeff Watson, who are used to the hectic pace of sporting events where instant replay keeps them hopping. Watson calls the EVS hard-disk nonlinear editors the coolest TiVo machines in the world.

Lawrence (Larry) Jordan directs from the All Mobile Video production truck.

“This has six channels,” he says. “I can record and output three things at the same time. With tape machines, you would have to stop the record process to go to the playback mode. Here, it is always in the record mode. Everything is random access. We are recording the actual concert as it happens and editing certain songs out for rebroadcast later in the show. When I first started 16 years ago, it was reel-to-reel, 1in. tape machines. We operated the slo-mo by hand. You actually put your hands on the reels and turned them by hand to create the slo-mo effect. Now it's a push of a button. It's all disc-based, tapeless.”

In addition to All Mobile Video, Ambassador Entertainment employed the services of East Coast Digital, a New York-based nonlinear editing group. East Coast President Scott Kleinberger and veteran editor Virginia McGinnis are at the keyboards in front of two Apple Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 nonlinear editing systems. Both edit bays have Intel eight-core Macs. One unit uses an AJA Kona card, and the other one has a Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Pro card, which can import files directly from the EX3 being used by the ENG crew.

McGinnis says she loves the pressure of the job. “The hardest part of my job is the pressure, but that's also the most exciting part. It's very rewarding,” she says. “You do four or five packages in a day, and it's aired live. It's up there and its over. My day's done. Most of the time, I am handed the footage and told to make it look and sound great. That's the way I prefer working, without a producer hanging over my shoulder.” She smiles and hits playback on the package under construction. With SDI output directly from the desktop, packages can go live to air via SDI terminals. McGinnis is a pro on both Avid and Final Cut Pro, and she leaves it up to the client as which system she'll be working on.

Usually audio is relegated to the rear of the production bus and takes a back seat to the visual aspects of a broadcast. Not on this broadcast. Not at this concert. The sound has equal rank. To make sure the quality is there, the Sony Oxford R-3 120-input digital console mixing board is manned by Michael Abbott, whose work has included the Grammy Awards, HBO specials, and the Country Music Awards. The mix board has 96 channels of analog mic preamps in, 16 audio loops, 24 aux sends, and 48 multitrack sends. The output is a 5.1 Dolby surround-sound signal plus an LTRT signal. (Left total, right total are the names given to the left and right channels of a 2-channel audio signal that contains Dolby surround-encoded information.) With a crew of 12 audio techs, Abbott says his job entails compositing all the mixed tracks from the concert audio truck with DirecTV's production microphones; all the audience-reaction microphones; all the EVS hard-disk playbacks; and all the communications: PLs, wireless IFBs, and hardwire IFBs.

“I take a lot of pride in the project management, which is part of my job,” Abbott says. “Managing personnel and equipment is a collaborative effort. You leave your ego at home.” He makes sure I understand that the hard part is getting ready for the show, making sure everything is working properly and plugged into the right place. After that, mixing the show is a breeze. Or so he says.

Wally Franco (pictured) shares the technical directing duties with J. W. Griffith for the 12-hour day. The pair uses a Sony MVS-8000 HD/SD multi¬format switcher to keep the show on track.

One crew member who has definitely left his ego at the stage door is
Technical Director J. W. Griffith. His talent far exceeds his modesty.
Griffith plays his Sony MVS-8000 HD/SD multiformat switcher like a
grand piano. He tells me he's a drummer who never made it to the big
time. So he got into television, where he's been making images fly for
more than 30 years. His body bounces to the beat of the rhythm, and he
rarely looks down at the glowing buttons beneath his fingers. He speaks
with the authority of a video philosopher, not a techie.

“You can't look at the switcher,” he says. “If you do, you are
undoubtedly late; you may screw one of your camera guys. They may not
quite be settled when the director calls their number. You've got to
always watch those monitors. You touch the switcher with feel. Each of
my fingers is assigned a different task. This is what I'll be doing
'til the day I die. It's all I know.”

Because it is a 12-hour day, Griffith shares technical directing with
Wally Franco of Somerset, Mass., one of a handful of locals on the
crew. Farm Aid is not a fast-cut, machine-gun approach as are some
heavy-metal music concerts. The goal is to have the audience see the
performers and hear the music. There are even some dissolves thrown in
for good measure.

The Farm Aid broadcast is more than just the music. “We really want to
engage the viewer,” says Patty Ishimoto, general manager of the 101
Network and vice president of original entertainment for DirecTV. “This
year, the broadcast is loaded with interactive information. The
customer at home can pick up their remote, press their red button, and
access information on the artist that is performing at the particular
time. They can also participate in a trivia quiz or get facts on Farm
Aid. We are moving toward a more commercial-free format to make it a
very positive viewer experience. We're also matching dollar-for-dollar
each viewer contribution to Farm Aid.”

“I am responsible for the signal leaving here safely and ultimately
making sure we get it on the air to our customers in both HD and SD,”
says John Ward, vice president of production for DirecTV. One unique
aspect of this production is the fact that all of the cameras are being
ISOed for later use using HDCAM SR recorders. “It's kind of rare that
on an HD remote you'd see a ton of tape machines,” Ward says. (The
production is being produced in 1080i at 29.97fps.)

Spevak likes to ISO all of his cameras because from this live
performance, he'll cut four 1-hour specials that will air later in the
year.

The final step in getting the broadcast back to headquarters in Los
Angeles is compression and transmission. This is in the capable hands
of Bob Adler of Coastal Media Group. “We take two feeds from the
production truck,” Adler says. “A primary and a backup as well as Dolby
5.1 and a backup stereo pair. This goes into a Harris [NetVX SYS-350]
HD encoder that compresses it down to about 40Mb of MPEG-2, and we send
those down digital fiber circuits to the DirecTV Broadcast Operations
Center in Los Angeles [full-band HD is 1.5Gbps].” The signal is then
uplinked via satellite to DirecTV customers as MPEG-4.

Before sitting down to direct the show, Jordan tells me he wouldn't
trade his job with anyone. “I tell young folks who're just starting to
do live television, ‘You never balk; you never think about a mistake or
something that didn't go exactly as planned, because if you stop to
think about it, you're dead in the water,''” he says. “And if you're
worrying about what went wrong or who made a mistake, you'll never
recover. It takes a while to get the comfort level to go with things
that might go wrong. That's not to mean I'm not having a mere heart
attack in that [director's] chair 2,500 times during the concert; it
just means I am going to try not to.” Twelve hours later, he's still
smiling.

Bill Miller is owner of Bill Miller Video Productions. He has
been producing films and video for more than four decades. Reach him at bill@billmillerfilm.com.

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