Video consumes most of the effort in putting on a show. We’ve already mentioned the work involved in lighting a studio for television. The video you see starts with one of our 4 studio cameras. The main 3 look like the one below:

The side flaps are open for some adjustments. These cameras are big and heavy, and it takes two people to move one with any speed and precision. We also have a 4th camera that is allegedly portable, though you should ask Turbo what she thinks of it after carrying it on her shoulder for a show. The portable gets many of the closeups you see of our guest critters.

A camera operator is only responsible for composing the shot and focusing. The video equivalent of exposure control — the aperture or f-stop setting on a good 35mm camera — is handled by a different person in a different room. Shown below are the camera control units, or CCUs.

The CCU operator, usually listed as “video” in the credits and called a “shader” around the studio, manages the exposure of each camera. Actually, the shader has a lot more to do than that. Before the show, the shader has to electronically register and chip each camera. Registration is done by aiming each camera at a special grid chart, and adjusting the red, green, and blue guns until they align. Chipping is the process of making each camera return approximately the same colors, and ensuring that those colors look “about right”. A chip chart shows a progression of gray from black to white, and on the waveform monitors, these look like stairsteps. When each camera has as sharp a set of steps as possible, they are compared to each other while looking at a human subject. Since they eye is most sensitive to skin tones, we make a final pass over the color controls to make sure people look natural.

During the show, the shader continuously adjust both the aperture and the black level to get as much detail as possible on the air. If you come to the studio wearing a black shirt, black tie, and black suit, and stand against our dark blue curtain, you will make the shader’s job very difficult. Nor do shaders like bright white shirts either. Neutral colors let the shader concentrate the available video bandwidth on the skin tones.

The 4 camera inputs, plus a number of other video sources, are routed into the control room and the video switcher, shown below.

The operator of this baby is called the video switcher or the technical director. When the director says “take 3″, it’s the TD he or she is talking to. The TD also runs an electronic graphic image storage system and a digital video effects unit. Sometimes several video images are combined in various paths thru the video switcher and effects box to produce the image you see on your screen.

Next up,the teleprompter.

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