- Hi, I'm Kurt Kaspar.
I'm the Studio & Remote Production Manager
here at PBS Wisconsin,
and I'm here in Studio A Control
to walk you through the role of the technical director,
which is the role I'm filling today in our production.
The technical director
is responsible for making everything happen on the screen
that the director calls for.
So, they sit in front of a piece of equipment
like you see next to me here.
It's usually a board that's got lots of pretty lights,
and it does all of the technical manipulation
that you would see on the screen.
So, one thing that you may be familiar with
from a lot of news programs, for instance,
is a double box effect.
The production switcher
is able to manipulate video in a variety of ways.
So, they can take the video and shrink it down into a box,
and it can make-- duplicate it into multiple boxes.
And that's where you'd see that double box effect.
Other effects you might see
during a standard television production
might be something simple
like putting the name over the bottom of the screen
where you see somebody identified during a show
or going
to a full-screen graphic.
The technical director is
a person that is responsible
for making this happen
whenever the director calls for that.
The switcher is capable
of performing different types of transitions.
Simple cuts, where the director will say, "Ready, camera one.
Take camera one."
And that just cuts from one camera to the other camera.
Or maybe a dissolve.
A lot of the newer switchers
are capable of doing fancier multi-layer effects,
sort of like a transition we use for our Here & Now program,
which is this transition effect,
which is activated by just a memory,
by pushing that button, which then runs the effect
and cuts underneath the fancy layered effect.
For some of our programs,
we would use the effects banks
to feed a monitor on the set, for example.
The director might call
for a change in the effect in the monitor at some point,
and I can do that
by reaching up to one of these effects banks
and just pressing a button,
which changes what's in that monitor.
Sometimes, we'll have things pre-loaded into the machine.
We can pre-load graphics, for instance, into the switcher.
We were doing an auction, which was live on the air,
and we had a phone number at the bottom of the screen.
And after the first couple minutes,
producer came walking into the control room and said,
"That phone number is not the correct phone number,
so the phone calls aren't getting through
to the phone bank."
So, we said, "Oh, my gosh, what can we do about this?"
because we didn't have an actual graphics person
in the building at the time.
So, what we ended up doing was
that had the right phone number from the previous drive,
so I was able to then manipulate that
by using a crop method on the switcher
to block off the new part of the number
and put it over the old number.
The really challenging thing about this
is it was all done
during a live shift,
and I had to do it
during a videotape,
which meant I only had about a minute and ten seconds
to do all of that work.
Laurie was counting.
She's like, "Ten seconds left, is that it?
"Five.
Yeah, we got it!" [laughter]
So, it was fun.