Sports Tonight Television Show Live from Mohegan Sun Casino

A few weeks ago, I worked on a television remote at Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. The job was to set up three Sony BetaSX cameras in the lobby of the casino and send the pictures from the Connecticut casino to the Comcast Sports Network control room in Burlington, Massachusetts. So basically, the “Sports Tonight” live television show was hitting the road for one night and was broadcasting from inside the casino.

The most interesting part, for me anyways, was the fact that they were going to switch the show from the Burlington, Massachusetts studio! So, how do you get three cameras, audio and communications from one place to the other hundreds of miles away?

The answer is fiber, satellite and telephone lines.

Comcast Sports Net, or CSN for short, hired a talented engineer named Art Collins. Art was the tech manager for the remote and he is very versed in this type of television setup. Art works for CSN as they carry all the home high definition Boston Celtics basketball games. He makes sure everything is working and is the master of television video, audio and communications signal flow.

On this particular remote, we would be using three old beat up Sony BetaSX cameras. I worked with these standard definition dinasours back in early 2000 shooting ENG for the sports television outfit. They have hundreds if not thousands of hours on them and they have been all over New England.

CSN also used VInten tripods and panheads for this remote. They had two Vision 8’s and two Vision 10 LF heads on aluminum sticks. These tripods were beat-up, but worked well given the abuse they had taken over the years. One of the Vision 8 head break knobs was held on with duct tape!

We used a bunch of open faced tungsten Lowel light fixtures to throw 3200 degree k light on the set. Very simple studio-type lighting using a three point system. Each person on the set was cross keyed and had their own backlight. I thank Jim Burgoyne of CSN for helping to get this set up and lit properly.

The audio department was setup on a small card table to the left of the set. A simple Mackie console was used to mix the show and send the audio feed to the transmission portion of the production.

Art Collins used a television rental company in Worchester, Massachusetts for gear who specialized in fiber transmission. Here is how it all worked.

Each of the cameras spit out a standard definition 16:9 anamorphic video feed via BNC cable. This cable ran across the casino marble floor to a big box full of transmission equipment. In addition to the three video lines, an audio mult also had to be taped down to the polished floor. This audio mult carried the audio from the Mackie mixer, crew intercom and talent IFB.

The portable transmission box (provided by the Worchester, MA company) took in the three video lines and changed the signal into light for transmission down a single piece of glass. The show audio was sent down another single fiber line and communications down a third. The final piece of glass fiber was used as a return video feed from Burlington to show us what was on the air.

All of this was done with the Diamond Back II fiber transmission gear in the rolling fly-case. Small Marshal monitors helped the technicians to see what source was what and help trouble shoot if there was a problem. Remember, these cameras were not switched here at the casino, they were being sent right to the television control room switcher to be cut and dissolved a hundred miles away.

Mohegan Sun was wired for fiber and this was a huge plus. May times I have worked in buildings were the facility has cable, but it is only copper. The fact that Mohegan is full of fiber makes it easier to broadcast out of. The four fiber cables from the Diamond Back II encoding TX box connected to a Mohegan Sun fiber junction box near the back of the lobby. These cables traveled through the casino to satellite truck about a mile away on the other side of the casino compound.

The satellite truck had a Diamond Back II decoding box at the I/O panel and turned the light signal back to copper. The truck then used a tri-path to beam the three cameras to a satellite and CSN in Burlington pulled it down, feeding the three cameras into their switcher. Of course they had to run the video feeds through timebase correctors, hd upconverters, blah blah blah.

All intercom communications from the sat truck were sent through phone lines using TELOS. The truck guy simply dialed a phone number for intercom to tie into the director in the CSN control room and dialed another number for the IFB to tie into the producer.

The show went well. We did have a few problems. The intercom was very low to cameras, so the cam ops had to crank the audio on the clearcom boxes. Art had to find a fix to a video cross talk problem by grabbing genlock from one of the BetaSX camera and jamming it into the other BetaSX camera.