Tech Photos - Part II
Well, as promised earlier, I do have a few more technical photos for those still sitting, waiting, and wanting. When I was in Beijing, our broadcast compound was much smaller in terms of the amount of land it covered. Here in Whistler, we cover half of a mountain. That said, it’s hard to cover the compound with my camera while ostensibly working.
Also, while in China, the city of Beijing where the International Broadcast Center (IBC) was located was a mere 30km away from Shunyi where I was working. It took about 45 minutes to get there in traffic. Meanwhile, here in Canada, Whistler is a good three hours from Vancouver where our IBC is located. Therefore, I haven’t gotten to photograph nearly as much of the back end of these broadcasts — even though I’m working with Commentary Switching at the IBC every day. We just don’t see each other.
Now that all my disclaimers are out of the way, here’s a quick look at the Mountain Switching Center which handles Commentary Audio routing for a couple of our networks and for some of the Alpine course. This is also where the networks connect to get their broadcast feeds from Whistler Village to Vancouver. The equipment in our Commentary Control Room at the Whistler Sliding Center is sort of like a smaller version of this with feeds going to this hub and to Central Switching in Vancouver.
Here’s one of the guys we seem to talk to a lot. His name is Colin and he helps us sort out any communications difficulties the networks may be having. Quite often the communication difficulties are caused by one of the reporters unplugging his gear by accident then calling us to see what’s wrong. We’re beginning to catch on that this is a regular thing so we may not be calling on Colin as much in the future. We’ll go straight to the source. Colin and the crew at Mountain Switching are all nice guys and great team players. You can click on his picture to see the hubs our circuits run on. (Lots of blinky lights and computery-looking thingies!)
If you ever see the wide shots of our venue and wonder if we have a blimp flying overhead to get those cool shots, the answer is yes, and here it is. I know you were probably thinking that, since we’re the Olympics, we can have any blimp we want, right. Apparently, this is what we want. This blimp is tethered in Whistler Village, so it gets a nice face-on view of our course. When you see the opening graphics for any of the competitions from the Whistler Sliding Center (bobsled, luge, or skeleton), usually the next shot you’ll see is the one taken from this blimp. If it’s more of a medium shot, you can see my building very clearly and, occasionally, you’ll see one of us in the control room waving out of the lower window on the right … trying for a piece of our 15 minutes of fame.
The blimp has some sort of gyroscopically-balanced camera that can be adjusted remotely. It can even swing around and get a shot of the Olympic rings in Whistler. For the record though, this particular photograph of the rings was not taken from the blimp. It was taken from another high camera position: my hands.
In my next update, a look at life in Whistler and creative uses of snow at the compound.
– Rich
