The history of a room
As a journalist and mass communications major, it may sound weird hearing that I know absolutely nothing about the broadcasting aspect of news making. I have been inside of a production control room once, and the feeling can be overwhelming. When you first walk into a production room, no matter on what scale, there are multiple components that go into it. You have several screens broadcasting different points of interest, screens that run the spoken words for the live breaking news, and buttons to press everywhere. When you put all the monitors, speakers, switching boards, effects generators and loads of other equipment together, you get a room in total that can create an effective and well put together broadcasts for tens to thousands of people to watch while you edit and switch up the broadcast on the fly.
When you view the news you will only be looking at the anchors spewing out words in front of you with cuts to videos and interviews that have been complied in less than 24 hours. Although, what you don’t see is the most essential part of the news we consume everyday — and that’s the production control room. Without the people that work in this control room hustling every day to make the news what it is — appealing, engaging, interesting — then we would not have news worth watching. Humans are all about being taken into something but grabbing our attention, and if you don’t have a group in the production control room constantly making sure our attention is held, then the anchors can only keep you watching for so long.
The person that runs the show is sitting pretty in the control room, saying what cameras should be the ones aired live in that moment, and which videos need to be rolling as the anchor reads the words on the screen that the director has approved. While my image captures what the control room can look like from the outside looking in with all the gadgets, sometimes the most interesting part of the room to look at is when people are in it, running around in a tizzy to get everything in order. No matter the scale of the audience for a news organization, there will be some form of a control room to get the production side in order, as no news organization can simply put up a camera in front of an anchor, go live, and hope that people will not only watch, but stick around the watch the whole thing.
Occasionally, televisions news rooms have been known for mixing their production control room and their studio control rooms and having them just be one “control room” where all editing, videoing, and all the ins and outs are put together to make their 5 o’clock news. In the same sense, some people can call a production control room the studio control room, since they are often mashed together regardless. The very well-known walls of monitors is also known as the “video monitor” wall where the monitors broadcast the programs, the different camera angles, VTRs, graphics, and any other necessary video sources that they will need to use for the broadcast.
When it comes to the editing aspect, there is a video mixing station that is hand-in-hand with the audio mixing console. These both edit and mix together what you would assume — video editing the transitions, the cameras, and the graphics, and the audio editing being what the videos going in between live talking sounds like, as well as managing the audio levels of someone’s mic so that they don’t sound too quiet or too loud. Production control rooms have been around since TV has been around, and will most likely get more and more complex as time goes by. Below is a video of what the classic broadcast control room looks like, which is even vastly different than the pictured one I took here in the present year. While technology advances, so does the complexity of these rooms, and the limits are only as controlled as the room.
