Day 44 as an intern.
Today was upsetting, but completing.
The day was certainly different than most and variety never killed anyone, but more than likely made them upset. As was the case with me. The very first thing in the morning set the tone for the rest of the day. I get on the elevator as I usually do and go to get off at my normal level and some guy pulls me aside and says, "Hey I can't let you go any furthere without a credential." I told him I usually come down here to work and he told me he doesn't care, I'll have to get a credential before I can go any further. Then I remembered why.
The ACC. The tournament starts tomorrow.
So I went upstairs and scrambled to find out what I would have to do to get my hands on one. I talked to our on-air guy for our games and gave him my story and he said he would get in touch with some people and see if they could get me one. Apparently what happened was when the mass e-mail went out about who needs a pass, I was left off the list. Thanks guys! With that, I have to try to get my own in less than 1 day before the whole shebang starts. So I kinda just hung out upstairs since I couldn't go anywhere else and talked to a few of the people up there. We got into a conversation about how different the arena looked when our cameraguy came up with passes in his hand. I told him about my predicament and he slid a pass into my hands and told me to go down there and hang on to it until I heard back from anyone else. THANK YOU! All I wanted to do was get down there and start work.
Finally, I was back in the broadcast area and ready to begin the working day. Too bad that would kind of never come. With the ACC tourny getting situated in the arena, they would also have to get their video processed into our system so that we could run it on our marquee. This is what took up the REST of my day. We were given an hour and a half long video that we were to capture into our computers (which by the way chews up A TON of memory) and compose into a sequence that we could loop continuously while the tournament was here. Sounds simple, right?
Well, first of all we had to isolate one of our edit bays to be able to be solely used for this purpose. In order to do that we had to connect it to our mainframe control room. In order to do that we had to run cables from the control room to the edit bay and plug them into the corresponding outlets. Again, sounds simple. Too bad it wasn't. With every cable we unplugged there was trouble with the new cable. We would lose audio from the system, from the tape deck, lose video from the computer, from the deck, and at one point had nothing to see or hear. It was a huge mess. Finally, we called in our tech ops director to come in and see what he could figure out. He worked his magic and finally, we were back up and running. That took about an hour and a half.
Once that got straightened out, then we could worry about bringing in the video. Guess who had to do that? ME!! I wasn't mad about that, in fact, I was really excited because it was work for the ACC and well, it was work! I was so glad to be able to do something other than look at a computer screen...so it was great. Until I found out what a huge hassle it was going to be. As I started to bring in the video, I came across one part where everytime I tried to capture it, our software would give me an error message. After revisiting that moment on the tape several times, I realized that there was a jump on the tape that would trigger the Avid. So we had to exclude that piece from what we captured. We finished capturing the rest of the huge video file, and it ended up occupying every possible second of memory we had available on that computer. I had to switch drives a few times just to make that possible. That took about 3 hours...mainly due to miscommunication and technical errors.
Once that was brought in, I began editing the video together. This was exciting too because I was editing something...it doesn't happen everyday so I welcome it with open arms everytime it's offered. As I was working on editing this video, our cameraguy walks by and I start talking to him about how huge of a task this video has become. I also told him about the part where we had to leave out a segment, and he was not happy with that. In fact, he told me to tell the ACC guy that we had to cut out that piece.
Hah. Right.
"You want an intern to tell the Associate President of the ACC that I cut out a portion of his video?" - this thought filled my head and intimidated me forever. Finally, the "ACC guy" came down to the broadcast area and it turned out that I never had to tell him that because the cameraguy did it for me. I thanked him later. SO when he asked me about it, I explained that there was a bump on the tape, but if he had a nother tape with the footage on it, I'd be glad to use that video. Of course he had another one, so I used it to replace the previouos, messed up video. So I had to go back and capture that and edit it back in to the original piece.
Whew.
Around 5.30, which is an hour and a half later than I typically stay, I finished the editing of this mess of a video. All I had to do was get it cleared by my "supervisor." He walked in, checked out the edits I made in the piece and the audio levels on the video and gave me the ok on a job that I took very seriously. He gave me a "good job" and sent me home. Finally!
The reason I stayed there so late was because I felt like this project was mine, and I wanted to see it finished by my hands. I very easily could have left, but this was my job for the day, and I wanted to finish it.
There is soooo much more I could tell you about this day, but frankly, my fingers are too tired to go on. If you want to know more, ask.
Until then, yet another day that was memorable.
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