I produced this video with Neil deGrasse Tyson giving play-by-play of Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Champion Takeru Kobayashi slowly eating a single hot dog for 10 minutes. Enjoy!
It's a heat wave in Boston, so I decided to fry an egg on the sidewalk.
This is a great position for recent grads. While it’s not specifically production related, it is all about validating incoming leads for which production products to help customers with. In a sometimes volatile media industry, the sales side can be much more consistent. Let me know if you have any questions - I love working here!
https://www.comeet.com/jobs/liveu/90.00C/sales-development-representative/F2.D69
I recently saw Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, in IMAX. It was a very well-done movie that I highly recommend seeing in theaters. As someone who has worked in local and national news, I took a particular interest in the broadcast-related storylines.
Get ready for a detailed, speculative, pedantic, nitpicky, and entirely unnecessary breakdown of everything they got right and wrong about how TV works. I used to work for Neil deGrasse Tyson, so I learned a thing or two about finding the truth in cinema. Of course, I know that this was a fiction movie and not a documentary, so artistic license is a real thing. I have great respect for the production designers, lighting designers, and everyone else on the crew. But I’m doing this anyway, because I am an annoying person.
If you work in the biz, your experiences may be different what I discuss below. This is just my perspective.
No, I didn’t take notes during the movie. Yes, I found an illegal bootleg of the film to refresh my memory, and yes, I reported the site, because I’m a tattletale.
You’ll definitely want to watch the movie before reading this; it is absolute spoiler city below. OK, I warned you. Spoiler time.
The last 20 minutes of the movie show the main characters in their quest to broadcast the hidden truth about extraterrestrial life to the world. This takes place at the fictional KCXE, an NBC affiliate in Kansas City.
For starters, the call sign fits the naming convention for a station west of the Mississippi, which always starts with the letter K. As a not-at-all-interesting fact, the real CBS station in Kansas City is KCTV, and the Ion station is KPXE, so KCXE seems to be a combination of the two.
This segment was actually recorded at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ. It seems like it was a fully functioning television studio before Steven Spielberg and his team walked in, so I don’t have too much to say about the actual broadcast technology, other than how some of it was used. The exterior of the building seems to be the Agile Strategy Lab, also at NJIT, which is not typically a television studio.
The first thing that caught my attention was how many people were on staff at KCXE. Local news stations generally have much smaller crews than depicted in the film. I’m sure the intent was to look good and create a sense of hustle and bustle. However, as fewer people watch broadcast news, stations across the country have had to do more with smaller teams. The major developing story about a potential World War III could mean they have a few more hands on deck than usual, but since Kansas City is not central to that story, it is unlikely they’d crew up for it.
Kansas City is the 33rd largest market, which means there is almost no chance they’d have multiple camera operators. The vast majority of stations use robotic cameras, and depending on the level of automation, those cameras might be controlled directly by the director rather than a dedicated operator.
There was a floor manager in the movie, which is a position that often still exists on a news set. In many stations, though, all you’ll see on the floor are the anchors and the floor manager. I genuinely don’t know what all the extra people in this scene are doing.
It is also unlikely that a real station would have spare lights standing around ready to go like this. Outside of national networks, you don’t tend to have a lighting designer handy, and just about all of the lighting is "set it and forget it". I’m guessing this just filled some dead space in the shot.
Also, if you look at the lights on the grid, they are all panel lights instead of fresnel or ellipsoidal fixtures. Perhaps there were other shots I missed where those kinds of lights were used.
On a positive note, every station has a loading dock or garage area packed with seasonal decorations and old set pieces. This detail was spot on!
By my count, there were at least seven people in the control room. In the local news world, you’re lucky if you have a control room team that large. Even some of the top markets can produce news with just an automation director and a producer. Some stations even run a one-operator production where the producer is also the automation director. KCXE seems to be one of the lucky ones that still has a larger crew, even if it feels a bit heavy for a standard newscast.
Josh O’Connor’s character asks where the video playback operator is so he can upload all of the secret footage. A playback operator, if that position even exists anymore, typically has nothing to do with uploading footage; it’s sent directly from the editors to the playback system. The computer they use to control the video players is likely a very cheap machine just running playback software, not doing any heavy processing or bandwidth-hungry activities. In fact, there’s a good chance that the PC they are using is just a KVM screen controlling a machine or servers located in the building's rack room.
All of that said, it’s highly unlikely that a high-speed USB port would be able to get any of the footage to the playback servers that fast. He’s sending multiple files over 60 GB each, and they take less than 10 seconds apiece. Dream on.
Also, let’s talk about file types. Whatever kind of definitely fake hard drives he was using to upload the footage, it is not a given that the playback servers could handle the file format. For decades-old government footage, unless they were constantly re-exporting it to modern formats, I’d guess there may even be some old containers like WMV or AVI in there. Professional broadcast playback devices often require very specific codecs and settings to play out correctly. The wrong formats won’t play, or worse, they will crash the system.
He requests "no tape delay ." If a station has a delay system, there is typically a button in the control room or master control that can be pressed if something needs to be cut. However, bypassing the delayed feed would have to happen from Master Control rather than the production control room, because they would have to route the raw control room output feed out to air instead of the delay feed. Also, there are only a few available seconds of delay anyway. Delay systems work by slowly building up a buffer so they can cut away when needed, and it takes time to refresh that buffer once you use it. With so much of the footage being questionable for air, they’d have run out of buffer pretty fast even if they wanted to use it.
He also requests "no cuts" from the director and asks what the playback channels are. There are four channels: W, X, Y, and Z. Letters are often used for playback channels to differentiate them from camera numbers, though it’s better to use concise, one-syllable letters so you don’t spend more time saying the letter than necessary. W is the only issue here, but whatever. Anyway, uncut playback is technically possible, though it seems that all of the video decks were playing video back at the exact same time, meaning they’d have missed three-quarters of the footage. Really, all they need to use is a single video player in playlist mode, or dual video players for back-to-back playback, particularly if they want to cue up the footage or use transitions.
He then asks to route the feed to the network so NBC has access to the broadcast. In rare circumstances, national networks will take local feeds live to air, though more often, the network anchors will toss to local reporters. There are many ways to get this feed to 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, which is where they actually shot the national control room scenes, including fiber, satellite, or IP connections.
Emily Blunt’s character is the station’s weather reporter. She is definitely not a real meteorologist, which is sometimes the case in real life. Some famous weather reporters without meteorology degrees include Al Roker, who I happened to also work for, and David Letterman. As you’ve seen with Al, it’s not unusual for a weather anchor to work on non-weather reports, though it’s rare they’ll take over at the main desk. That said, most weather reporters don’t use a teleprompter and are very good at bantering and stretching to fill time. These are valuable skills when it comes to breaking news, so they are often integral parts of major stories.
A station this far down on the market list almost certainly does not have a makeup artist. Believe it or not, even in the biggest markets, most on-air talent does their own makeup, and they even have to buy it themselves.
The bad guys set out to cut off the local power supply and the emergency generator to the station. That’s bad, because without power, nothing works. While some of the more expensive machines like the switcher or the playback server might be on a smaller battery backup, once main power is cut, it may take many minutes for them to cycle back on. They would also likely need a bunch of configuration and troubleshooting to get back on the air. So when Emily’s character magically turns the power back on, it’s unlikely everything would just instantly be working again.
She points her magic alien thingy at different elements in the studio, and they instantly power up. I didn’t see her point it at the server room where things like video playback would actually be coming from, so the TVs she turns on definitely wouldn’t have any video running on them. But of course, this is alien magic, so who am I to say that it’s fake?
When the local power goes out, right before the generator turns on, everything in the studio turns red. There is no good reason for emergency lights to emit red light; it would be white light. But I guess red looks cool.
Also, a desk light is shown off, and then in a different angle later, it’s back on.
Yes, this segment actually features a real control room at 30 Rock!
You can see the teleprompter rolling in New York while Blunt’s character is talking in Kansas City. It is highly unlikely they’d have routed the prompter feed back to NY, and I’m just guessing that the teleprompter operator in NY isn’t randomly scrolling for fun. The one stretch of a theory where I could see the prompter feed existing in another station is as a hot backup; some national networks always have someone standing by to take over in seconds if something happens to the main anchor. But it’s almost never a national person covering for a local person. A close-up shot shows that it is still the North Korea script, so I suppose it’s possible the operator just left the prompter running and didn’t stop it.
As soon as they start playing the video clips, they show up in multiview boxes that are labeled for cameras. While it’s possible that the labels don’t match the router source, most modern systems tie the name and the source together.
Also, as mentioned earlier, they claim to have four video playback channels, yet here you can clearly see they have at least six EVS channels. They are all playing back at the same time, which would be a silly thing to do because they’re only showing one video at a time in Program.
Back to 30 Rock, their multiview is showing individual video playback channels from Kansas City. All that was requested was transmitting the program feed to the network, and it’s unlikely that so many transmission paths would be wasted on raw video playback sources. In theory, the local station and the national station could use the same server and cue them up separately, but let’s be honest: no.
AI is an obvious concern for the network producers blindly airing this footage, so they have some definitely fake software that can quickly identify what is AI and what is real. The problem is, the pixels they are verifying are likely compressed or converted from their original form, particularly if they are coming in as a live transmission.
The NBC national producers decide to send the feed to the pool so all other networks, including their competition, can have access to it. There is a brief discussion about whether to include a network bug, and "no bug" is decided. But as you’ll see in just a moment, the bug doesn’t matter. A single Ku-band satellite feed is sent.
CNN, among other stations, seems to have the content on-air before the feed is even available to the pool. Even if they happened to catch the local broadcast from KCXE, there is no way they would have been prepared with custom graphics and a cut-in within seconds. Obviously, there can be some time-shifting we don’t see or know about, but again, shut up.
They all have a separate shot of Emily Blunt and the footage in their own double boxes with their own branding, which would be near-impossible to do without two separate feeds. As mentioned earlier, only one feed was sent! Therefore, even if they were to include NBC branding, it was clearly going to be cut regardless.
While control rooms often have competition feeds up to monitor other stations, there is no way they’d have dozens of channels of all local and international stations using their footage magically available on the multiview. At most, they’d have the main national competitors and possibly the NYC local stations.
You can see nearly every single box in the multiview is showing slightly time-shifted footage of the same clip. There’s just no use for that. Why?!
So that’s it as far as the movie itself goes. But with my day job as a solutions specialist at LiveU, I have some suggestions for the next time they’re in a rush to get alien news and footage on the air.
The good guys clearly have an unlimited budget, considering they literally rebuilt Emily Blunt’s entire childhood home in a massive warehouse. In reality, the vast majority of remote shots in local news are transmitted to the station using bonded cellular devices, typically in a beltpack or backpack form. Almost no one uses microwave or satellite trucks as their main transmission paths anymore. These cellular units are cheap to rent or buy, and the crew could have simply gone live from wherever they were hiding. They could even have sent the video over multiple paths. This would have avoided the dangerous and time-consuming process of driving to the station for the broadcast.
We’ll ignore all of the logistical challenges due to the existing plot, like when they get discovered by the bad guys right before they leave for the station, or the fact that they didn’t know their hero was going to be a TV anchor until around a day before the airing. They really could have planned ahead for the broadcast.
Alright, if you made it this far, you clearly have no life, just like me. Let me know what you think!
I just got out of the new Nate Bargatze movie The Breadwinner — and thoroughly enjoyed every part of it… with one exception.
There was a major plot point around a live stream, and BOY did they get it wrong. MINOR SPOILER ALERT: Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner is effectively producing the live stream, and I had assumed she’d have the right team and tools in place for a high-quality setup.
I ASSUMED WRONG.
I was a bad person and took my phone out to grab a few still photos of their setup because I couldn’t believe just how wrong it was. I’ve been working in live streaming and media for over a decade (even won an Emmy for it!), so here’s my take.
Let’s start with the camera. It’s a Sony camera on a rig (possibly an A9?), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Sony makes great cameras — and it was a Sony movie. Yay corporate synergy!
The problem starts when you try to get that camera into a computer. As we’ll get into, they’re using OBS on an Apple laptop. There is no built-in full-quality “live stream directly from camera to laptop” feature on a Sony like that. Nor is that true for most similar cameras.
More importantly, there were no visible cables going from the camera to the laptop, and no sign of a wireless transmitter sending a feed either. So there’s no real indication the camera was actually feeding anything into the computer at all — it just looked like a camera on a rig with no path to broadcast.
Then comes the computer setup. They’re using a MacBook, running OBS, with a Stream Deck as a control surface. This is actually a very standard and popular setup. They did enough research to get most of the right components… but after that, it starts to fall apart.
For starters, the Stream Deck is showing the default button template straight out of the box. If you look at the icons, none of them have anything to do with live streaming. When the operator hit “go live,” it was just a random default icon.
Now OBS. Starting in the bottom right, the Controls panel shows no active stream, no recording, and no virtual camera running. Could they be outputting via HDMI or using NDI? Technically yes — but given they were only broadcasting to YouTube, that’s unlikely. In almost every normal setup, they’d just be using OBS’s software encoder. So as shown, the stream is neither live nor recording.
Next, the Sources and Scenes panels… and there’s nothing. No video input, no capture card, no webcam feed — nothing. All they should be seeing here is a black screen.
Moving on to the Audio Mixer, you only see Desktop Audio and Mic/Aux. Neither clearly maps to a proper external audio setup — and even more importantly, there shouldn’t realistically be any meaningful Desktop Audio activity during a live production. And there’s no visible Mic/Aux signal either. Those meter readings don’t line up with anything that’s actually being captured.
On the bottom right, CPU usage sits at a steady 3%. That’s a level you almost never see while OBS is actively encoding video, even on a strong machine. On a laptop doing real HD encoding, it would absolutely be higher.
Trust me, it says CPU 3.0%
And finally — not the worst thing in the world, but still: name the damn project. The profile and scenes are both untitled in the top bar, and that’s just not how organized productions are run.
Trust me, it says Profile: Untitled - Scenes: Untitled
So that’s everything I noticed at a quick glance. For a production involving someone as major as Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner, there’s no way this would have been the actual production method.
Nate, if you’re reading this — you can still fix it for digital release! I used to work for Neil deGrasse Tyson, who got James Cameron to fix the stars in Titanic after it was already in theaters. THIS IS MY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON MOMENT.
And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t say how this should have been done. I’m a Solutions Specialist at LiveU — something like the LiveU Solo Pro would have made a lot more sense — taking a clean camera feed and streaming it directly to any platform. It would have been easier, cleaner, and a lot less wrong if they’d just used the right tools.
It was a great movie - I highly encourage seeing the movie in theaters! Just close your eyes during the live streaming scene.
End of rant.
