- Hi, I'm Will Salzmann.
I'm one of the production supervisors
and lighting directors at PBS Wisconsin.
And I am standing here in front of an emissary from the 1970s.
This is our patch panel.
Every single one of these cords represents a light
or a circuit out in the studio.
Each one of these plugs, when they pull down,
has got a letter and a number attached to it.
For example, this is L1.
This is the L pipe circuit #1 in Studio A.
This cord runs all the way up through this patch panel
that you see behind me, through the 1970s,
up through the conduits, into the studio,
down to the battens, through the battens,
and then down to each individual light.
When we've done a light hang, then we have to do a patch.
We come to the board and then we see a bunch of holes
that these can go into.
Each one of them represents a dimmer.
So we patch this into a dimmer, turn on the circuit breaker.
Now that is attached to the dimmer.
The dimmers are actually a floor up,
and there are over 90 of them in Studio A.
There's 36 of them in Studio C.
And they use so much power, they've got their own room
and their own air conditioning system.
The reason there's so much spaghetti behind me
is that there are actually three shows patched right now.
But because we only have a little over 90 dimmers,
we don't have enough dimmers
for each show to have its own patch.
So what we do is, in between each show,
we come in, we toggle off the lights
that aren't being used by the show we're about to shoot,
we toggle on the ones that are being used.
Then those dimmers just operate the lights for Here & Now
or Quick Fit or Director's Cut
without bringing all the others up.
Our light board is actually capable of patching
all of the studio lights together into submasters,
inhibitive submasters, groups, whatever we need.
However, because our dimmers are also from the 1970s,
they are not capable of working with a board quite like that.
So we actually have something called a response box upstairs
that translates the digital DMX signal
coming out of our light board
into hieroglyphics that this thing can understand,
and then this brings up power to the lights.
For the last 50 years,
a chain of crew people have lovingly maintained this system.
Our engineers are probably the only ones
who actually know how to keep these things running.
Typically now, we use 1,000 watt
and 2,000 watt lights to light our programs.
We have the 5,000 watt light lamp down to 2,000 watts,
because we need the width of the beam,
but we no longer need the intensity.
The sensitivity of the cameras and the amount of light we need
has changed dramatically in the past few years.