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Power Snafu at Super Bowl


cmgoodin

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I think CBS really "Dropped the Ball" when it came to coverage of the Super Bowl.

 

What, No battery Backups on their audio console and wireless Mic receivers?

 

Although no one is yet talking about it officially, it was obvious when the power went out in Half of the Super Bowl Superdome stadium in New Orleans, they clearly had all their audio eggs (or at least most of them) in one basket.  The video truck still had power but apparently the main press box lost power and all the on-air commentators as well as the house PA remained mute for the balance of the half hour blackout. Only when they scrambled to get a sideline mic activated after about 5 minutes of just crowd noise,    was there any reference to what was going on.  Five minutes of silence during a Super Bowl is an eternity.  I would have loved to hear a recording what was going on on the headset channel of that CBS Truck. 

 

I bet in the future all radio mic receivers, inlne DAs and sub mixers will have UPS power in the future of all football broadcasts.

 

Anyone there have any first hand info to add to my speculation?

 

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The broadcast booth was likely on a fiber run so when it lost local power the link went out taking audio with it. 

 

There's something to be said for plain ol' copper, though the distance between the booth and the truck compound there probably makes it prohibitive to run an analog line.

 

As far as the delay getting to the sideline reporters, my guess is it was a few minutes in the truck just figuring out what was going on and realizing the booth wasn't coming back and 'where do we go now?' compounded by the fact that the sideline guys probably weren't even in position at the time of the outage, not expecting to be needed for a while.

 

I'm sure the director, producer and audio PL's were a mess.

 

I saw a tweet that read "My favorite part of the game was when I couldn't hear Phil Simms."

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The broadcast booth was likely on a fiber run so when it lost local power the link went out taking audio with it. 

 

Steig is 100 percent correct once you lose a fiber box your out of luck and sometimes when you lose a box it can be maddening trying to figure out which one and where it is. 

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Steig is 100 percent correct once you lose a fiber box your out of luck and sometimes when you lose a box it can be maddening trying to figure out which one and where it is. 

 

Steig is 100 percent correct once you lose a fiber box your out of luck and sometimes when you lose a box it can be maddening trying to figure out which one and where it is. 

 

No doubt about the fiber link, but why didn't they have local UPS in the Booth to power the link?  A couple of $100 off the shelf UPS boxes pluged into the Wireless receivers, Fiber link power supply and com box would have at least let them have communication.

And if the camreas were also used in HH mode they would have had batteries on them and been able to cover it as a news event. 

 

I had a similar power failure in the booth of a Super Bowl in Pasadena decades ago and had the teleprompter on my own Local UPS.

I lost local booth power for about  10 minutes during the halftime recap and continued on with the UPS power until we could find a new source of power and ran a 100 foot cable to restore the feed to the UPS.  No one was the wiser.   Even the booth did not know. 

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“Immediately after the power failure in the Superdome, we lost numerous cameras and some audio powered by sources in the Superdome. We utilized CBS’s back-up power and at no time did we leave the air. During the interruption, CBS Sports’ 
Steve Tasker
Solomon Wilcots
 and our studio team reported on the situation as a breaking news story, providing updates and reports while full power was being restored to the dome including our sets and broadcast booth. All commercial commitments during the broadcast are being honored.”

 
“At a time when they should have been aggressively gathering news, CBS’ crew was satisfied with the crumbs the NFL dropped on them. And they swallowed the scraps gladly,” 
wrote 
Bob Raissman
 in the 
NY Daily News
. “Not once during the 34-minute delay did a representative of the National Football League appear on camera to attempt to explain what caused half the Superdome to lose power. Why should they? No one from CBS put any pressure on them.”
 

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Well, I'll be interested to find out if it was just a simple kick-out somewhere or something the facility or the power-company did.  Lots of lights were still on--were they on backup generators?   DId the whole place go down or just some circuits?  What was it they did that made the lights come back on?

 

philp

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We were in NFL Control rolling on an interview when the power went out

 

Wow, great moment to be right there to watch the guys' reaction!

 

I said the exact same thing Courtney did: why the F didn't the truck have backup power? CBS carried video for about 90 seconds before bailing to commercial, and they had zero announcers, nothin'... just crowd noise and then music out to the bumper. Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

 

Given that the game makes CBS about $500 million in commercial time, you'd think they could've spent $100,000 for backup power for all their trucks for the show -- especially if they can somehow keep the cameras going but not audio. 

 

I'm not even a football fan, but I thought it was a great game -- loved the 108-yard touchdown, loved the commercials, thought Beyonce's show was OK. 

 

They also need to hire some other camera ops.  Kept seeing soft shots.

 
I cut 'em some slack. Some of those lenses are 100X, and there's not a lot of depth of field with the light level in the stadium. I ran camera on football games (on and off) for about 4 years in the 1970s, and it's a nightmarish job. Back then, we only had 40X lenses (with extenders), and those were hard enough, especially for end zone cameras, which is where I usually wound up. 
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Like Matt ( Hi Matt! ) I was there as well, my location during the day was on the 300 level next to the NFL suite and two suites down from the CBS broadcast booth.  I have to say that, from where I sat,  I thought that everyone did a really professional job during the power surge, no yelling or panic, just pros doing their best during a bad time.  The reason that the broadcast booth did not cut to the on field set right away once the broadcast booth went down was that the set on the North side of the field is taken down during the game so that it is not blocking the view of the fans located behind it. I watched them build it in a rush once it was clear that it was not going to be a quick fix with the power. 

 

The truck compound and the North side of the stadium never last power. 

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The truck compound and the North side of the stadium never lost power. 

 

It occurred to me that maybe there was a data line or a connection to the satellite uplink that failed. Either way, all I know is, the announcers' mics glitched right out when the lights failed, and all that got out on the air was crowd noise and then the bumper music. To me, they should be able to keep going after anything, short of a bomb going off.

 

I'll say this: I'm glad that some of the lights stayed on. I shudder to think what would've happened if the entire stadium was pitch black for 35 minutes...

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A failure to the satellite would have taken the whole thing off air.

 

Likely they had something like a Telecast Adder up in the booth carrying mic, IFB and PL to/from the truck.  One at the truck end as well to break out to the patch bay.  Fiber link between the two.

 

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When the unit lost power, they lost anything plugged into it. A UPS in the rack would have kept the system up.

 

Generally most of the outboard gear like that comes with the truck as part of the package or an add on, not really something the network would have or deal with.  The network says "We're gonna have two guys in the booth." It's up to the tech manager to determine the logistics and order the appropriate gear.

 

All the times I've used that system, it's never included a UPS.  Largely due to the fact that generally, at that level, power is taken for granted and not a problem 99.9% of the time.  The thought is sort of that if the power went away, losing a couple microphones would be the last of your worries.  An all-or-nothing scenario.  Not to mention that when you're in a venue of that size, one thing you just kinda assume is that you'll have AC.  A 'selective' outage probably never occurred to them.

 

I'm guessing those racks will start shipping with UPS units standard in the not too distant future.

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All the times I've used that system, it's never included a UPS.  Largely due to the fact that generally, at that level, power is taken for granted and not a problem 99.9% of the time. 

 

I bet they're not saying this now. I also suspect a $199 UPS would've kept that rack up with no problem. 

 

My house has four or five different computer systems in it, and every one of them has a power backup on it. Granted, it might not keep the machines up for more than an hour, but we certainly wouldn't lose a recording or corrupt a file we had open. The trick for me was also getting all the external drives powered from the same UPS (with a 2000-watt APC on my main system). 

 

This is also a problem in post-production. I vividly remember a show from the late 1980s where they were on-line editing the master videotapes, and a massive power surge and failure hit the building. Every tape machine they had went into record for a quarter of a second and then died. An hour later, after we got everything back up, the editors realized that every single master tape now had a "spike" in it, and that shot could no longer be used! They wound up using a temporary 3/4" dub of the master (which looked pretty horrible) to cover up the glitch, but they limped by. Nobody noticed.

 

Within a few months, all the editing systems and (eventually) all the color-correction systems in the building had power backups. Granted, post-production is easier than live TV: if disaster strikes, we can generally make a new edit and make the problem go away. In live TV, I don't think you can have too many backups. 

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" “Not once during the 34-minute delay did a representative of the
National Football League appear on camera to attempt to explain what
caused half the Superdome to lose power
"

They probably did not know themselves...

 

At the Pro Bowl, the entire TV compound (4 NEC trucks + PSS up-links +office trailers) was on its own generator, but power was not run up to (or out to) the broadcast positions. "the booth" was on stadium power, but there was a UPS in the rack for the (fibre) audio, (NBC/NEP)

 

I don't recall if NFL sports, (player wireless) or NFL Network had backup power; NBC had a wireless contractor (CP communications, real pro's), and I don't recall if their on field racks had UPS.

 

For all of our sound systems, we included UPS units to keep 'computer stuff' from crashing and needing reboots (consoles, wireless mic's, boards) but there was no generator to run the PA systems' amplifiers...

in radio booths, I've used UPS since we went from POTS telephone systems to modem / codec based systems, as even the briefest hit caused these systems to need to reboot and reconnect.  There is always a battery powered mixer available, even if not in-line....

 

The PB halftime show was not carried on TV.

Edited by studiomprd
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I was on the sideline when it happened. My job during the week was ENG audio for CBS. On game day I was basically a camera assist, so I didn't have any audio duties. 

 

I can tell you that the audio tent right next to me on Champions plaza during pre-game WAS on UPS power. I'm very confident that for at least 10-15 minutes or so the wireless mic receivers were probably up and running on the field set as well. Why the booth was quiet I'm curious. 

 

As for the outage itself I have a theory: I think it was one of the giant rats they have there shorting something out up where the power comes into the stadium. From where I was on the sideline you could hear a loud "pop" as the lights went out. It really sounded like a short. The report has been an abnormality where the main power meets the stadium. Abnormally sized rodent if you ask me. 

 

Earlier that week the 4K cameras were faxing out on the field. One of them got amazing footage of this HUGE rat running across the field like out was in some sort of race. It kept getting played over and over again in the truck. It was incredible footage. You could see every hair on the thing moving in the breeze. I wish I had a copy of that. Would freak out my wife. 

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This is their story, and they are sticking to it:

 

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap1000000137262/article/superdome-power-outage-at-super-bowl-xlvii-resolved

 

Entergy New Orleans, Inc., announced Friday that the blackout was traced
to an electrical relay device, which was installed to protect the
facility during a "cable failure between the switchgear and the
stadium."

 

Entergy, an electric and gas utility serving Orleans Parish,
states the identical setup was successful during a string of recent
events including the New Orleans Bowl, the New Orleans Saints-Carolina Panthers clash in Week 17, and the Sugar Bowl.

 

During the Super Bowl,
"the relay device triggered, signaling a switch to open when it should
not have, causing the partial outage," the company wrote in a statement.
"This device has since been removed from service and new replacement
equipment is being evaluated."

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