Viva Las Veags

Next Tuesday I’m going to Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters and Broadcast Educators Association convention. When most people hear “Las Vegas,” they immediately launch into either a squeal of delight or some other affirmation. To which I usually say, “Save it, I hate Las Vegas.”

If NAB or BEA were held in any other city I’d be happy. I don’t gamble. I’m a happily married, middle-aged family man. I don’t do that “other” Las Vegas stuff. And the shows, while I might find one that appeals to me, not sure if you’ve seen this or not but, the ticket prices for those shows are expennnnnsive!

But all that said, I am really looking forward to this trip because I’ll be on a pretty neat shopping trip. I’m going to see the equipment I hope to acquire for Orange Television that will launch us into high-definition television production and deployment. This is a pretty big deal.

Television as we know it has been produced on a 4 by 3 screen since its invention. The move to digital has been slow and steady but only for the last few years. Now, we’re changing to a 16 by 9 format with a huge increase in picture quality through high-definition and going completely digital. I’m also going to be looking at going “tapeless.” What that means is that all production will be acquired, edited and sent out via hard drives or other solid-state technology. Much the same way that VHS tapes were replaced by DVD (and now Blue-Ray), videotape is being replaced by hard drives. This is a seismic shift in television.

The other neat part of this trip is the back end; the Broadcast Educators Association convention will be at the end of the week. BEA is Thursday, Friday and Saturday and each day will be filled with papers, panel discussions on topics of interest for those of us who are in the academic field of broadcasting. It’s also a good chance for me to see what other schools are doing and how we can improve ourselves here at Syracuse. I’m on a panel discussion myself on Saturday morning. I always learn something new and interesting at BEA.

I won’t blog next week but when I get back I’ll fill you in on the details, what I learned and maybe what I’ve decided.

Wish me luck ;)

Think Time

I haven’t been very consistent with my blog this semester. Blogging is on my calendar to do every Friday morning but sometimes, things get in the way.
I like to blog because it forces me to step back and think about things. Thinking time is vastly underrated. We Americans are kind of programmed to keep moving and accomplish tasks so just sitting and thinking is frowned upon. It shouldn’t be.

I do some of my best thinking when I travel because I’m not in a place (work or home) where I can accomplish tasks. Unfortunately I haven’t traveled much lately so I’m down on my thinking time. And I guess I should clarify what “kind” of thinking time I mean.

We all think about stuff. “Gotta clean the garage, pick up the prescriptions at the drug store, fix the gas grill, etc.” That’s pretty normal.

The kind of thinking I haven’t had much time to do lately is bigger picture stuff especially here at OTN. I’m trying to gather a lot of information about high definition television so I can move OTN to producing and deploying high definition content. While that might sound simple, it’s not, especially for a non-techie like me. I really have to buckle down and wrap my head around codec’s, bit rates, file management and workflow, budgets, physical layouts of how this gets positioned here in the office to name just a few things.

And you know, we are constantly being asked to divert our attention somewhere that robs us of that think time. I delete between 350 and 400 emails every week. A lot of them are junk but many require me to respond. That’s a lot of email.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I guess I am. I like think time. I want think time. I have to get better at making think time a priority. I also like blogging and I apologize for not being more consistent this semester. I promise to do better.

They got your back

I was in New York City last week as I took ten students on the Newhouse Benchmark trip. We visited CNN, Atlas Media Corp., Guiding Light (the soap opera), NBC, ESPN at Madison Square Garden, CBS Sports and the Late Show with David Letterman. At each stop we were given a tour and with the exception of ESPN, all the people who hosted us were graduates of Syracuse University. A sidebar, there were SU grads on the crew at the ESPN compound; they just weren’t part of the tour.

Enough has been written about this wretched economy but if the participation of our graduates is any indication, Newhouse students will be well taken care of. I was both impressed and gratified at the support, kind words and genuine interest all our tour guides had with our group of ten.

“Let me know what I can do for you.”
“Feel free to email me with questions.”
“Things are tough but I’ll do what I can to help.”

Just a few of the comments I heard.

I was also so proud to see some of our very recent grads doing so well. Liz Morrison as Production Coordinator for Atlas Media Corp and Jay Bungay is an editor for “Guiding Light.” They’ve both been out of school for only two years.

I was also tickled to see my old colleague Bob Matina again. Bob is the studio director for CBS Sports. If you’ve watched the “NCAA Selection Show” or the “NFL Today” you’ve seen Bob’s work. Bob is a ’78 grad and he and I worked together at WCNY-TV in the early 80’s. When I called him to ask if we could visit him he was only too happy to oblige.

Say what you want about the plusses and minuses about Newhouse but one thing you simply can not say is that the people who leave here and go on to work in the business do not care about you. They want to help and are almost always willing to do what they can to pave the way for you.

Things are tough but compassion and support are in big supply out there if you are part of the Orange Nation.

What's in your future?

People aren’t buying cars. They’re not taking big flat-screen TV’s home either. Furniture or appliances? Fuggedaboutit.

So what are we consuming?

Food and entertainment. Attendance at the movies is up. People are also staying home and watching TV. What we do in television is still in demand.

Kind of nice to know.

As we try and navigate our way through these tricky economic waters it’s worth putting these experiences into our memory banks. When things turn around you’ll want to bring them back to remind yourself of what bad times were so you can appreciate the good times. But you’ll also want to make sure you have what I call “split vision.”

Split vision is the act of being focused on two different parts of your professional life. The present and the future. The present is pretty obvious: work hard, be on time, add value to your job and be seen as a valuable contributing member of your organization. Hopefully you are part of the group that’s adding to the bottom line. Literally.

The future part is a little trickier. It requires you to look at where you are, what skills you have, what you like to do and are good at and see what kind of changes you need to make to stay current with your industry. Or, look ahead to see what kind of changes you need to make to head in a completely different direction with your career. You need to do this, the future thing, every day and you need to be prepared to make changes that might be looked at as a sacrifice on your part or the part of your family.

My old boss at a company I worked at used to say something I liked. He said, “The Univisions (the name of our company) road ahead is always under construction.”

So what we do is in demand and the people who can bring a lot to the table in their work places will be better off than those who can’t. Are you a good writer? Can you shoot and edit? Can you light well? How about web skills? Any competence in After Effects, Photoshop or Flash? Do you know how to encode video to the web? Ever done any voice-over or on-camera work?

These days will end and things will turn around. Will you be ready for the next difficult economy?

It's a perfect game

Major league baseball pitchers and catchers have reported to spring training and it’s been 15 years since I’ve cared about that.

I used to be a big baseball fan. Big. I was the person in my family who when they couldn’t quite think of the perfect birthday or Christmas gift got me something tied to baseball and I was happy with it . . . usually.

Then came 1994.

That was the year major league baseball players went on strike. Can you imagine that? They went on strike because, um, you know, I can’t remember why but whenever ANYONE goes on strike it has to do with money. What was the end result of the strike? I can’t remember that either other than they cancelled the World Series. For me that was a deal breaker.

I grew up playing baseball in Little League, in front of my house on the street, in the backyard, pretty much anywhere anytime I could find a game I’d play. I played softball as an adult and played pick up games with my friends. I played the game because I loved it, it connected me with my passion and perhaps most of all, it was fun.

Baseball is such a beautiful game. It’s the only game where the offense doesn’t have the ball. The dimensions of the field, 90 feet down the base paths, 60 feet six inches to the mound, nine players spread around the field are perfect. The amount of strategy involved on every pitch is mathematically stunning.

A man on first, decent speed, the pitcher has a so-so move to first, the hitter is a left-handed pull hitter, keeping the runner on forces the second baseman to cover a wider area so the first baseman can hold the runner. Can the pitcher keep the ball outside so the hitter doesn’t get a pitch to pull? Does he walk him? Should the hitter bunt?

An amazing game. And I miss that.

But I just can’t go back. They broke their promise to me. They promised to play the game and it’s not that they just quit playing for a while; they didn’t play the World Series. So I quit the game they quit. I never got a chance to pass down that love to my kids. I really miss loving baseball.

And for the record, I was a Red Sox fan and never watched a single inning of any World Series they were in this decade. I couldn’t tell you who their players are, no idea.

I love the game and I really miss it.

When it comes to Syracuse men’s basketball, I am the eternal optimist. As I look at the team this year I see a team that has all the ingredients to make a deep run into the NCAA’s. They have big dominant players inside who can score and play aggressive defense. They have guards who can run an offense and shoot the three and they have depth. OK, well, maybe not a lot of depth but there’s enough for a run. They have a coaching staff that has experience and success in the playoff’s and they have played a schedule (so far) that has them battle tested.

I think the one thing I haven’t seen this year is a team that can play for 40 minutes with intensity. It shows up but not as often as they’ll need it come tournament time. Can they do it? A qualified yes because, as they say, you play like you practice. If you’re practice sessions don’t have intensity, it probably won’t show up on the court. Now, I have no idea how this year’s team practices but based on the performance on the court this year, I could conclude that the practice sessions have been inconsistent too. But you know, they had that insane stretch where they played something like five games in 10 or 12 days against ranked competition. How would you like to go to school and have the toughest final exam you’ll every take . . . every day!?

And having watched Syracuse basketball for 30 plus years, the team has always seems to do better when they fly under the radar a bit. Right now they’re a middle of the pack team in the Big East, not ranked in the top 10 and they’ve lost some games they should have probably won and lost, badly, to G’Town, Villanova and UConn. They’re definitely under the radar so I see a deep run into the tournament, maybe Sweet 16.

But I say that every year.

My head hurts

H.264, MPEG-4, Codec, HD, SDI.

This is a tiny sample of the future of television. And it makes my head hurt.

I started in television when there were three major commercial networks. The proliferation of cable was still a few years away and “working in TV” meant getting a job at a television station, perhaps working your way up and moving on to bigger markets. Working in a “Top 10” market was seen as a sign of success. I guess I don’t have to tell you things are different today.

Just like when you go to the grocery store and are blown away confused with the number of choices you have for something as simple as toothpaste, so goes the medium of television. And it’s funny how when computers first came out they were complicated, erratic and intimidating but over time they got easier to use and understand. Not so with television.

As the industry steers toward high-definition, the “kind” of high definition one chooses to create is as important a decision as any you’ll make. Will you capture in HDV? 1080i? 1080p? 720p? Uncompressed high-definition? These are some of the questions and issues I deal with now as I try and steer the Orange Television Network toward high-definition.

My experience and background is mostly on the creative side as a producer, director, editor and videographer. The technical side is something I’ve learned along the way. And let me tell you, this HD stuff is mind numbing. But fortunately I have some good friends who know this stuff better than I do and I’m consulting with a couple of vendors who are really knowledgeable so I think I’ll be able to figure out the right and best solution for OTN.

But in the meantime, google H.264 and see why my head hurts.