Stop tangling the triax cable!

Let me be honest right from the start, I have never ever been interested in football. I was forced to play football every Friday as a young boy at my primary school with a fascist bible bashing headmaster.

However, moving away from religion back in second year I went to my very first football match Watford Vs Millwall. I was amazed at the time of how smooth of an operation it was to get crowds inside the stadium for the Saturday match. Beforehand however we had to lay about an miles worth of Triax and audio XLR cable to the various positions around stadium. It was a very long process and often ended confusion but we do get it done. After that we power on the cameras and start FACS. FACS is essentially making sure that the cameras and camera operators know what they're doing. The racking engineer starts to White balance and makes sure that all six cameras are producing same picture. once that is done is just waiting around until the 3 PM kick-off.

As Watford where promoted to the Premier league we are now tasked to shoot the match footage for Redding football club. The Madejski stadium is easier to set up than Watford, there is a patch bay right next to where we park outside broadcast truck. From there we patched all six cameras including audio instead of cabling triax cable up to the camera position. From the photograph above you can see the Grass Valley LDK 6000 camera system. The lens is a Canon HJ22EX7.6BIASE. Altogether with the camera body and the lens it's worth £40,000! That's a hell of a lot just the one camera considering it only produces a 1080I 50 feed that is processed in the truck. On the side no however we use those exact same cameras for the BBC introducing sheets and for Watford football clubs Hornet show that shot in front of the green screen and soon to be used with vizrt virtual studio. There will be another blog post on vizrt later on in the year.

Do I enjoy working with these cameras? Yes. Very much so! As much as I enjoy using DSLR’s and mirrors cinematic camera systems there's nothing like setting up a very large camera and recording football. Even though I find it funny that I honestly have no idea about football and certainly do not want direct football matches in the future it still gives me great joy to wake up and know that I'm shooting football match. However I think I'll leave a job space open to someone who knows really what they're doing. I'll stick to music!