Traffic Hits... Fo Shizzle!!!

I really enjoyed Lenslinger's Anatomy of a Live Shot, so I thought I would do a similar story showing all the kids how I set up my live traffic hits! Don't forget, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them, because sometimes the thumbnails don't show the whole picture!

First, of course, I need to get to where I am going. My destination of the day is going to be Charleston and Rancho. Apparently there is some road construction and it is our duty to let the people who have been living under a rock for the past three months know this! So I head north - past the Strat - and up to my destination!

First thing I do upon arriving is power on the generator in the live truck. I have a nifty switch in the front seat so I can do it before I even park! If only the rest of the switches were up front... I could have half my live shot set up before unbuckling my seatbelt!

My first job once I get parked is to raise the mast. This requires me to first and foremost to look up. If I see no power lines, then I hold the little up switch on the mast controller. That pumps air into the hollow metal tube thingy. It then pushes the mast up to a height of 50 feet so that hopefully I can get line of site on one of our three receive sites.

Once I get the mast up, I make a guess to which site our live ops person will want me to shoot at. Since I am the third element, I make the guess that he is going to want me to shoot to our Summerlin receive site to the west.

I was wrong. Apparently he wants me to share our Stratosphere receive site with another crew so the helo can have her own receive site. Greedy helicopter.
So I am forced to re-aim the dish, since I need line of site. (Note - there used to be an image there but I hear it was messing with IE *coughUEFOXFIREIDIOT!cough*) Once I do, I power up and send my wonderful NTSC (which means Never The Same Color -- I guess you'd really have to spend 7 years in MC with the engineers to appreciate that one) bars. After a couple of minutes of 'Pan..... keep going...... keep going......STOP! SHIT! Go back.........STOP! Now, TILT!' I am given the three words I love to hear.

'Lock it down.'

WOO HOO! My live shot is tuned in and I am ready to take my place as a member of the Channel 8 Skywitness Traffic Team! I even have little pilots wings that if you want to see I'll show you... But I don't volunteer that kind of information.

Anywhoo... due to businesses and power lines I had to set up in a small strip mall parking lot. Said parking lot was about a third of a block down from my assigned corner. Not that big of a deal, Just have to string out a couple hundred feet of cable and poof! Here I am ready to show the awakening Las Vegas valley the scourge that is construction (storm drain work if I am not mistaken) on West Charleston at Rancho.

Lighting my traffic hits can be a pain in the ass. Allow me to demonstrate. Too my east we have sunshine!

And too my west, we have really, really dark clouds...

What does this mean? It means that when I pan down the street from west to east to show the congestion and construction I have to roll my iris about 10 stops to keep everything from being washed out. I ponder auto iris but the CAT bus that drives through my shot and sends my iris flying to the open side discourages this.

When I am not doing a traffic hit the producer usually will ask me for a beauty shot or a weather shot. Sometimes my location doesn't give me the ability to get them anything other than buildings or sand. But today there were some nifty looking clouds to the west. I happily used the trucks mast cam to get some bang up weather video only duplicated by the 15 other cameras we have around the valley! But alas I was still an important part of the Neighborhood Weather team...

We enter into CBS' Early Show at 7:10. My downtime is spent working on grabbing new angles and new, more exciting ways to bring viewers their morning traffic. I also check all truck systems to make sure the vehicle is running at 100% efficiency. I then keep my ears on the scanners and make calls to METRO and NHP to find out if there are any serious accidents we need to inform the public about.

Seriously, no one comment on how fat that picture makes me look. Really. I'll rip your soul out and eat it.

At 8:05 Daniel pipes into my ear and tells me that I am clear to come back. I stow my equipment, drop my mast and wind up my cables. I need to buy some gloves though. It's amazing how dirty and nasty those cables get. I guess I could use my winter gloves, since there is no winter here!

And THAT, my friends is how I make my living. Usually. Stew is right, yapping about my anime and my political beliefs doesn't a good blog make. I will still rant every now and then about W and animated boobies... But mostly I will be chronicling my life as a disposable cameraman on the mean streets of DHV (Dirty Hidden Vegas).

Fo Shizzle!