I neglect this website, and I know it. I always say to myself that I’ll post more and do my best. I never do. TV keeps you busy and when you’re not busy, you’re resting from being busy.

I have left my job at the Irish Parliament television station for that of a bigger fish, the national broadcaster. Currently I work in the network monitoring centre where I deal with the number of transmitters. My role has given me a different system and circuit that I can learn from and gain insight to. I think the more informed anyone is, the better. My work in at the Oireachtas has given me so much insight into how a television station operates. Over the past 4 years I also worked on a number on Outside Broadcasts, in different trucks for different companies. Learning how things are done with each so that when I am planning a media system or setup that I have already seen very efficient (or sometimes incredibly inefficient) setups.

Though my last job did involve working irregular shifts, the job here is completely shift based. Meaning I either work an early, a late or a long shift. Long shifts are fine when you learn how to approach them correctly.

As I said before, I deal mainly with transmitters. They mostly connect to one another via microwave signals, and broadcast on the designated Digital Terrestrial Television channels allocated for that purpose. I’ve found a whole lot of interesting content here in audio-video form which suits me best because nothing beats having visuals to explain a technical point.

A major part of my job is health and safety. Before starting I had limited knowledge of transmitters, other than the small FM one I had in my car. Soon after starting here I learned that very high powered transmitters can emit so much energy that at a short range they can be incredibly dangerous and create an NIR hazard (Non-Ionizing Radiation). I read the schematics of our transmitters and read whether or not it will be dangerous for engineers to undertake certain jobs.

I’m doing my best to become more productive and on-target. I’m failing, a whole lot, but what I’ve come to try now is to target some things and make them part of my routine and slowly add more one by one.

I am SOO sidetracked but obviously if anyone does read this then ask a question. The point of explaining my production method was to say that now soon I will factor in this site on my list of things to stay on top of and hopefully you’ll be getting more from me. If there’s anything anyone who is interesting in how television works, in starting to work in TV and media but hasn’t a clue what they’re doing, or are in the profession but have a question. I think you’ll be able to comment somewhere?? Or just tweet me @James_McKenna

When I started working in broadcasting there were many many things I hadn’t even known existed. For example, feeds can be split into digital and analog (composite) feeds. AND under digital feeds, there are embedded audio and de-embedded audio feeds. So what’s the difference between embedded feeds/signals and de-embedded signals?

Embedded feeds have audio embedded in them which is (hopefully) synced with the video signal. This can be very useful when sending feeds long distances as audio can tend to fall out of sync if not embedded with the video. However, not all broadcasters like embedded video. Some are very much set up to work with de-embedded signals, so sending embedded ones would not help them in the slightest. To embed audio with video you can send the feeds through a mux, and similarly you can send embedded feeds through a de-mux. This de-embeds them.

I was completely oblivious to this fact and found it hard to grasp without it being explained to me properly.

This is given that I had no official training before I started working in broadcasting.

Not that clear on the differences between digital and composite feeds, just that to be aware of them and what signal you are taking out of the back of a camera. SDI is usually digital and composite cameras give out a (you guessed it) a composite feed. Digital and analog are interchangeable with a DA (Digital-analog) converter.

The Matrix does exist.

Shit you not, I work with a machine called a matrix. Effectively it’s a very large switcher. We use a Snell one at work with something like over 300 inputs and 300 outputs. The inputs can be assigned to multiple outputs which is incredibly useful. These ins and outs can be assigned through a router we have, giving us control of the 300 sources and destinations with the click of a button. That being said, we still do have and use a patch bay, but this can lead to complications as when something is overpatched, it does not take it’s source from the matrix and can cause confusion.

HDMI cables can be weird. From experience, I have found that some cables will do some jobs and not others, where some will do all of them and others hardly work at all… What’s with that? The ones I bought from the euro shop (something like a 99 cent store for the Americans) seem to work far better than the ones for 30 or 40 notes. They may not be as durable though or long. But working with HDMI is a pain in the buttocks. It’s nearly impossible to adequately extend, to get working, easily change the PC resolution with or just get working.

Sony PetaSite’s are damn cool. They work on these digital tapes that are around 1.6 TB a piece depending on how they are formatted. The PetaSite holds around 900 tapes and is used as a tape archive. Even listening to it make “whoosh” noises when requested to move tapes from slot to slot puts me in a state of Awe. Our latest PetaSite works on LTO-4 tapes and is much much smaller then our older archive which works on DF2 tapes. Amazing how it works and the archive is set up. More detail will be touched on this sometime soon.

I wish I had more pictures but I’m writing this out of the office, preempted and offline… on a bus of all places.

All our archive recordings are done in MXF and archived in this format. We are still in standard definition because if we moved in to HD then our high speed playback served would probably fill and meltdown in about 4 hours… so let’s not do that!

For our broadcast, everything is made fiber and then changed back as we work slightly remotely from where the cameras are located. Robotic cameras are very cool. As are the caption generators and vision mixers, but more on that soon. Warning: I am a serious Ross fanboy!

Reckon that’s enough for now!

Seeyeeee

This will probably be repeated somewhere like in an “About Me” section but none the less, I feel I ought to explain a bit about myself to begin.

My name is James and I am a twenty year old Broadcast Technologies Engineer. I am an Irishman working in my native capital city, Dublin for a broadcast company. Starting off with little to no experience a year ago, I thought I would like to share some of what I have found on my travels and experiences working in broadcasting for over a year now. I am new to the blogging craze but with the internet becoming more and more the main source for new knowledge, I thought it was a good time to start one.

“What do you actually do?” – This is a question that haunts me everywhere I go and am asked by every person who I tell that I didn’t go to University and instead took up a more hands on approach. I maintain the equipment used in our live operation control rooms, problem solve any hitches or issues discovered and maintain our live studio where we have a wide selection of guests sent to a broad set of countries and companies. That involves communicating with our staff and also foreign staff, switching feeds on links and keeping a level head in a crisis situation.

I’m not all that sure how long these blog posts are expected to be but I’m going to leave it here I think. There is no set day I will post again and I have a vague idea what I’m going to post about. I very much hope to have a post on all the different equipment and systems that we use, new and old, and try my best to explain how they work and why they are affective. That or I may never post on this blog again due to sheer laziness. Slán.

James