Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1314367
Fall 2020 – LOCAL695.ORG 21 Fall 2020 – LOCAL695.ORG 21 craftspeople in different parts of the country had to come together to remotely build a show worthy of the production's legacy. Performances were recorded by separate teams in California and New York. This normally live event was shot over the course of seventeen rigorous days. COVID testing and contact tracing protocols were put into place. Skeleton crews worked in shifts with sanitation breaks scheduled regularly. Anyone who could work remotely did. Personally, I was surprised that my job could be done from home. In recent years, Viacom and MTV have opted to record the VMA's utilizing a server-based media platform called Pronology mRes. Instead of recording a single camera signal to a single memory card that must be offl oaded and then transcoded before an editor's work can begin, server- oriented recording allows engineers to simultaneously record multiple cameras directly to multiple storage units. This unique standalone encoder is capable of recording three tiers of compressed or uncompressed video per input channel—allowing recordists to deliver a high-resolution media fi le, an edit proxy, and a streamable proxy as soon as the director yells "cut." This is achieved by routing camera signals into a series of mRes servers and then networking them to multiple pieces of network attached storage via a high bandwidth network switch. In recent years, the go-to network attached server unit for the job has been the solid- state drive-based rNAS, also from Pronology. The video from the SDI inputs is stored in an uncompressed format on the mRes server's internal drives and then an operator utilizes timecode to select "in" and "out" points to create media fi les across multiple pieces of storage on the network. In conjunction with a transfer client application, post- production media can be wirelessly delivered from site to post in near real time. So imagine my surprise when I got the phone call saying, "Yeah, you're going to be doing all of that from your apartment." I had no idea how I was going to do that. And so, discussions began as to how we would achieve a herculean task. We needed to record every camera of the performances in New York in real time, create a primary and a backup copy on site, forward a copy of the complete show to Geiger Post so they could splice it with content being shot in Los Angeles, and deliver screeners to producers for review—all without me ever leaving my bedroom. First and foremost, I had to clean my apartment. Potentially historic television couldn't be made in my home if I was tripping over pandemic clutter. After coming to terms with and conquering a lifelong problem with hoarding, I set to work preparing my space for the show. I needed to be able to take remote control of up to twelve servers at one time and needed to be able to switch between them rapidly. I utilized two computers as controller devices while a third allowed me to maintain rapid communication via email, Slack, and text messages—all of which came in rapidly throughout the shoot. Every TV and monitor in my apartment was drafted into service just so I could keep track of all the devices on site. On day one of prep, the leg of my desk broke off and I was forced to replace it with a series of pop-up tables from my garage. The production mailed a comms PL system to my address, which would allow me to communicate with various parties on site and in remote locations during work. Installing this upstairs in my room required me to run an Ethernet cable downstairs and across the living room to my router. Of course, it wasn't quite long enough and some furniture had to be slightly rearranged to move things closer together. In New York, mobile truck engineers on site powered on the twelve required servers, routed the camera signals to them, installed the network attached storage, confi gured a high- speed internet pipeline, and gave me Wi-Fi access to two of the machines on the network. It quickly became a game of the blind leading the blind as I communicated with NEP Group's Dave Goodman, Jeff McEntire, and Orin Smith in order to describe what buttons to push and what ports to use when I couldn't see what they were doing. Likewise, I would often have to work off of equally vague and confusing descriptions from them in order to make things work on my end. Eventually, we found success and I was able to take remote control of those two machines using Remote Desktop Connection, a Windows-based networking application designed to facilitate remote computer repair work. I was then able to make the computer I was remote controlling take remote control of any other machine on the network, allowing me to control any of the twelve machines I needed Jillian Arnold worked on location to record the Los Angeles segments of the VMA's.