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On the road with Dale Amon I have been on the road for the last week and God only knows how much longer. Right now I am backstage doing edits on the webcasts from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco. Twelve hour plus days… but the pay is good. A few minutes ago the Surgeon General of the United States spoke and I took a photo, not of him, but of the video monitors and the backside of the scrim.
I imagine this is a slightly different view of things than the media out in the Grand Ballroom are getting!
 Photo: D. Amon, all rights reserved
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Luxury. I used to dream of web services.
In my time as a knob twiddler the guy behind the set was worrying mostly about whether the slides were in the right carousel the right way round and the right way up.
Of course when it was a slide lantern I had to worry about keeping the carbons trimmed as well.
And you try telling the techies of today & they just don’t believe you….
Hmmm… Like a SuperTrooper?
I’m too young for that, I only ever saw one pair of Xenon SuperTroopers on tour (& no, it wasn’t Abba!). They were about 8 foot long and built like a brick shithouse. They kicked arse though.
The SuperTrooper in the Abba Video was actually a CCT CSI, I had the pleasure of working for CCT for a number of years.
Our Odeon still used Stelmars and a slide lantern using carbons until 1980 or so. The last time I struck up an arc was about 30 years ago.
Our apologies for this backstage technical arcana, normal critically rational individualist intellectualism will resume as soon as possible.
I work in the trade show industry, and that’s what we call a “small” main tent setup. You can literally have millions of dollars in switching and routing gear in the big setups, with multiple HD screens and several cameras.
One of my favorite show situations was when we had Gene Krantz (the Mission Control guy for Apollo 13) speaking, and he spent 45 minutes backstage with me, talking about how far technology has come since the late 1960s (when large screen video projectors were handbuilt for NASA, and color video cameras cost about what the entire rig in the photo costs nowadays). The LCD/DLP video projector revolution of the last few years is pretty much in the “holy crap” range… and it’s getting worse (a couple of companies showed battery powered video projectors at CES this last week).
Hi Dale, I was a networking geek in Dublin up until a few months ago and several of my client’s domain names listed your name as a technical contact. They were NI registered domains. I assume that was you?
Dan: Yes, probably was. I was the Tech director for the first ISP in Ireland and my name is sitll on a lot of odd domains and a good chunk of the NI IP address space.
I was the person who registered most of the NI political parties domain names.
Cirby: I’m not sure of the definition of small for a hotel conference, but 6100 investors with JPMorgan behind it is at the very least not ‘small’. I might also note that you only see one portion of the gear in the photo. And there are multiple ballrooms. We’ve been running 4 live streams and another bunch of private ones) is certainly enough to keep us busy.
We broadcast investor info on about 50 companies today (and I edited down most of them). Little ones like Eli Lilly, Merck,….
Dale: Oh, I know there’d be a lot more gear in the room, and 6100 is a lot of people in one room, but for a video switching rack, trust me, that’s not really big (it looks like you only have a couple of videotape record decks, for example, instead of six or seven – you’re running three cameras, then?). Right now, in Orlando, we’ve got a couple of big shows running at the same time at OCCC, and there’s over 100,000 people at the Convention Center every day, with seating for about 10,000 in one meeting room (plus exhibit floor, plus breakouts).
An example: I worked a show for a banker’s organization in New Orleans a while back, and there were two main screens (16×20 feet each) in back of the stage, six secondary screens (9×12 feet each) flying over the stage, another ten screens making an entrance hall at the back of the room (six 9×12 “wall” screens, one at the end of the “hall”, and three 10.5×14 “ceiling” screens). There were eleven different video monitors for prompting and to show what was on the screens for the presenters, a sound system that took up almost two semi trailers by itself (a million bucks + right there), five cameras, and a video switching rack that took up an area about 50′ by six feet deep by six feet tall…
This was only for about 4500 people in the audience, at that. Hell, I’ve seen banquets set for over 5000…
If you’re interested in graphics, I did a show for Snapple a few years ago where I (the only Power Point operator) had six computers running. Three primaries, three backups. At the same time. Four of the computers were dual-monitor rigs, so I had ten monitors to play with, for five days straight.
Oh, I know things can run to quite a large size. We’ve only a run crew of 12 on the videocasting and power point side (www.MAPDigital.com, also with a couple more people remote working from NYCwhere the company is based) and I’ll guess the sound and light company has another 12-15 run crew. (Lots more staff on the non-tech side of course). It’s no Iron Maiden concert or election year Convention.
But big enough. The kit in the photo is not my side of things by the way… that is just the sound and light company front back stage setup for the one ballroom. We get our video and audio feed for the Grand Ballroom sessions from that section.
I ‘live’ in a backstage room during the show, where we monitor the streaming and edit down the on-demand media files. But our gear does not look spectacular… just a bunch of rather high powered PC’s stuffed onto tables.
Dale: Yeah, I know the drill. I’ve gotten to feed quite a few webcasts over the last couple of years. We’ve apparently worked for some of the same end clients (I’ve done more than a few shows for the big pharma folks like Merck and Pfizer, as well as the financial folks). Since I’m a freelance tech, I work for a bunch of different companies in any given year, so I’ve probably worked some shows along with your company along the way.
The big problem in the industry now is that the old, big companies are getting eaten alive by the little ones, and I have to keep calling around to see where all of my old friends moved to this week…
Possibly. Besides the SF show I’ve mostly done NYC shows. This is a sideline for me: mostly I do sysems and product R&D.
One memorable show was in the WTC in 1998. I got to see the underground ways of the place. I know people I worked with at the hotel there are dead now. Perhaps one of many reasons why I have no feelings of mercy towards al Qaeada.