They say that, "Battle is long periods of boredom punctuated by short bursts of terror." Well, television is like that, too.
After 5 days of everything going relatively smoothly all hell broke loose on Friday night, right before we started taping on Saturday morning. A glitch developed in my program that was throwing a white raster flash on the screen every time a question was displayed, and it needed to be fixed and proven before we could start taping, but I couldn't get to work on that because I was also needed to record student intros, a mind-numbing process that required me to click a button once every 2 or 3 minutes. Unfortunately it was once every 2 or 3 minutes for over 3 hours. When we stopped at 8:30pm I had a quick dinner and then finally got working on my fix.
I worked on that until after 1am and then I still had 90 minutes more work to get the questions for the first day into my computer for taping. This night was a flashback to year one of the show, probably the worst 2 weeks of my life. I stumbled to bed after 2:30am and set my alarm for 4 hours later. I was due on the set by 7am.
My late-night fix worked perfectly the next day, and we taped our first 4 shows without hardly any problems. My biggest challenge was staying awake and alert the whole time. After finishing only 15 minutes late for the day, I had another 3 hours of boring student intros to tape.
Now it is Sunday evening here and we've just finished day 2 of taping and got another 4 shows recorded without any troubles. Once again I am in the middle of another 3 hours of student intros, but this time, for the first time in 3 days I have my computer back and I am able to check emails and post to my blogs again.
We have 3 more days of player intros to tape after this, and 6 more days of taping 4 shows a day before I get to go home again. We're barely a quarter of the way through, but I feel like I might be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe that's just the muzzle flash of the cannon.
After 5 days of everything going relatively smoothly all hell broke loose on Friday night, right before we started taping on Saturday morning. A glitch developed in my program that was throwing a white raster flash on the screen every time a question was displayed, and it needed to be fixed and proven before we could start taping, but I couldn't get to work on that because I was also needed to record student intros, a mind-numbing process that required me to click a button once every 2 or 3 minutes. Unfortunately it was once every 2 or 3 minutes for over 3 hours. When we stopped at 8:30pm I had a quick dinner and then finally got working on my fix.
I worked on that until after 1am and then I still had 90 minutes more work to get the questions for the first day into my computer for taping. This night was a flashback to year one of the show, probably the worst 2 weeks of my life. I stumbled to bed after 2:30am and set my alarm for 4 hours later. I was due on the set by 7am.My late-night fix worked perfectly the next day, and we taped our first 4 shows without hardly any problems. My biggest challenge was staying awake and alert the whole time. After finishing only 15 minutes late for the day, I had another 3 hours of boring student intros to tape.
Now it is Sunday evening here and we've just finished day 2 of taping and got another 4 shows recorded without any troubles. Once again I am in the middle of another 3 hours of student intros, but this time, for the first time in 3 days I have my computer back and I am able to check emails and post to my blogs again.
We have 3 more days of player intros to tape after this, and 6 more days of taping 4 shows a day before I get to go home again. We're barely a quarter of the way through, but I feel like I might be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or maybe that's just the muzzle flash of the cannon.The pictures above show how the signal from my computer is fed into Helge's switcher where it is composited with many other layers and signals into the polished video package that will play on TV.
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