Broadcast & Mobile: ENG Audio
Streetwise Drama & Remote Audio for Automobile Culture
In Los Angeles the car chase is primetime entertainment. It seems to be a broadcast TV phenomenon peculiar to the city. You probably get them in your home town occasionally, too, but here, aerial shots of a car speeding down the highway pursued by black-and-whites is enough to pre-empt any show.
Or not speeding, as is often the case, for LA must surely have cornered the market in slow-speed pursuits. In one recent example a suspected murderer was chased in circles around the same few blocks, rarely exceeding the speed limit, after an initial attempt to gate-crash an independent TV channel’s news show. The suspect’s route became so predictable that news vans were soon on the scene and, seizing the opportunity, he even stopped to speak to at least one camera crew.
ROLLING, LIVE & MOBILE
Which raised an interesting production issue. How do news reporters, whether on the ground or in the air, get live audio back to the studio from the field?
John Holland, assistant director of engineering at KABC-TV’s new facility in Glendale, Calif. points out that there is a distinction between live audio and live-to-tape. “In a live situation you’ll find that we generally take the easiest possible path—mono, one microphone, pumped through the truck, pumped through the microwave, back here to the studio.”
The microwave system by which remote sound and picture is transmitted to the station, while capable of multi-channel, is typically mono for a couple of reasons, explains Holland. “Because of the crowd of microwaves in this market we want to keep the modulation as tight as possible, so we use a close-in subcarrier for our main audio channel.”
The second reason, referring back to those car chases, is due to the tracking process by which the helicopter’s antenna locks to a receiver. GPS and compass information, determining the helicopter’s position and relationship with the receiving dish system (KABC maintains seven receive sites, some with dual dishes), is encoded, modulated and consumes the second audio subcarrier, thereby allowing only mono audio content.
The staff at KABC may well be the authorities on the subject of ENG (electronic news gathering) audio for, as Holland reports, “I believe we have more live vans than any station in the country; we have 28. Most stations will have a certain number of live-equipped vans, with a mast and a microwave transmitter and the antenna on the roof.
“Then they’ll usually have a larger complement of straight news vehicles. [Management] took the position at this particular station in a city this geographically large and populous that it’s not practical to send someone out and expect them to get back through rush hour traffic and make it in time for a story. So all of our units are live trucks.”
As for helicopters, KABC operates one and has a backup arrangement to provide full time coverage should it become unavailable. According to Holland, during periods such as the sweeps they will use both continuously during daylight hours.
GROUND BOUND
For ground crews, the single channel of audio may be a mix of the reporter’s mic and a camera-mounted mic. “Whether you’re interviewing a subject, shooting a piece that is then going to be edited, or if you’re live, [reporters] generally will use wireless,” Holland reports. “All of the field crews are equipped with wireless, generally with an interchangeable head. But they’re equipped to go wired in applications where there are too many wireless mics and they have conflicts or an interference problem.”
With such a large fleet of trucks KABC has no one standard microphone, and is almost constantly assessing new products. Cameraman Stephen Chacon reports that he ventures into the field with an Electrovoice handheld mic with Lectrosonics wireless transmitter and a Sony lavalier. Both have proved bulletproof, he says.
“Many of the other wireless microphones are set up for production,” observes Chacon. “They work great on a sound stage, great at fifty feet, but they don’t work well when you’re walking and talking.” He confides that he changes the transmitter batteries for each news story. “I’m not going to lose the story over a fifty-cent battery!”
Cameras, whatever the brand and model, typically include gain control and limited mixing ability, with metering both on the camera and through the viewfinder. Although commonly capable of recording four tracks, Holland notes that only two are ever used in ENG.
A multi-pair snake on a cable drum links the camera to the truck, carrying the two audio channels, an intercom channel for off-air instructions from the station or the truck, two video channels, plus a spare. Arriving at the scene and grabbing his camera, the cable and a bag containing a hard-wired mic, Chacon says he can be set up in two minutes.
“We like to make audio a priority, but in our business they need a picture right now,” states Chacon. “You give them audio without a buzz in it, steady everything down, then work on the audio.”
PRODUCTION INTERCOM
A 30V RTS intercom system, powered by the truck, provides IFB or interruptible foldback - broadcast terminology for wireless earworn monitoring, for communication with the truck (KABC fields a two-man crew plus reporter) and with the station via cell phone.
Where cell phone communication is not possible, or as is routinely the case with the helicopter, two-way radio is used. The truck or helicopter dials in to an auto-coupler and, with communication established, the station’s transmission engineer logs their site information and coupler channel into a software program.
That information lets the assistant director know on which channel to communicate with the remote team. A red light offers reasonable confidence that there will be an audio signal present when they go live to the field.
As anyone who watches TV news knows, reporters wear a discrete earworn monitor. Cameramen typically wear the industry standard Beyer DT108 one-cup headset with mic. Chacon says that he generally applies gaffer tape over one channel of the reporter’s RTS unit so that they can only hear the master control booth and will not be distracted by camera directions or conversation between cameraman and truck. Los Angeles being a union town, he adds, directions to the reporter must come from a Directors Guild of America (DGA) member in the booth.
The helicopter crew, communicating through standard aviation headsets, typically consists of two people, says Holland: “The combination pilot and reporter, and a photographer in the back, who handles the microwave and the camera. The camera itself is a pretty hands-full operation.”
Holland continues, “What goes out on all the couplers when we are on-air is a full mix coming from Master Control. When Master Control tallies Production high, that is, when the audio room goes on the air, it switches to 24 individual clean mixes off this board.”
MAKING MIX MINUS
KABC’s SSL Aysis on-air digital audio console supplies a separate clean or mix minus feed to each remote dialed-in to the auto-couplers. Should any of the couplers fail, a radio channel continuously carries the full on-air audio mix.
A mix-minus feed is a mix of the audio channels minus that particular channel fed to the individual’s IFB. This prevents the reporter from being distracted by the echo on his or her own voice due to the transmission chain propagation delay. In KABC’s all-digital video plant the propagation time of the video can be upwards of a quarter-second, notes Holland.
“Mix minus can be challenging,” acknowledges audio engineer Michael Kamm, whose job includes the correlation of coupler channels to the correct mix minus feeds, “especially in news because it’s so fast paced. And when you’re doing a pre-record, our IFBs out in the field are all fed the off-air signal. More often than not they’ll be hearing Oprah Winfrey while trying to do a pre-record so we have to override it, but it’s really easy to forget.”
The weakest link during any remote audio, says Kamm, is acquisition. “Gone are the days of the Sennheiser 416. It’s a great warm-sounding mic—as long as you don’t have cars driving by! But more often than not you’re in a situation with police cars and so on. The cleaner the audio is when they acquire it, the cleaner it’s going to be when we broadcast it.”
Holland sees the elevation of the car chase to primetime entertainment as a sign of the times. “As Walter Kronkite said years and years ago, ‘We don’t do news, what we do is run a headline service for the newspapers.’ What’s changed is that people have stopped reading, and the two lines of the 10-second soundbite are what they know of the story.
“TV news is not journalism per se, it’s part entertainment. But if that’s what you accept as what people want, the helicopter is such an amazing tool, because it lets us see so much that we couldn’t see from the ground or otherwise, whether it’s a traffic story, or a crime in progress, or a chase—it’s a different perspective.”
Steve Harvey lives in Southern California and is LIVE SOUND! audio convergence specialist. He can be reached via e-mail at harvey@pacbell.net
September/October 2001 Live Sound International