I've had a couple times when things went wrong during a newscast, and both times had the same response from the producer. 1) I was new at directing, we were in the middle of a package in the show, and all of a sudden all the monitors in the control room started jumping around. The sync generator to the entire station went out on us. The producers response was, "Come back on camera!" I said, "I can't, look at all the monitors." So the producer said, "Just go to weather!" 2) I was TD'ing on a GVG 4000, again, we were in the middle of a package. The director called to insert a CG, I hit the keyer button, and keyed the CG. The director called to lose the CG, I hit the keyer button, nothing happened. The scene changed in the video, the director yelled, "LOSE THE CG!" I hit the keyer button, nothing happened. I looked down at the switcher, everything was still lit up, I punched every button I could, and nothing happened. I yelled, "The switcher is down!" I told the CG-op to erase the CG page we were on, she did. Fortunately, the tape machines came into the switcher via a router which was right next to me. So we came out to camera by me routing the camera into the input we were on, cut to the next camera the same way. The anchors were told to go to a break. The CG-op, thinking, "I can help" calls up a "Coming up" CG for the tease we were supposed to run; of course the CG is still hot, and a "Coming up" CG pops up on air. I yelled "ERASE THE CG!" It's obvious at this point not every one understands what "The switcher is down" really means. Told Master Control to roll the break, but they delayed waiting for me to fade to black (like usual), finally got into the break. Another TD in the room ran back to the racks to reset the switcher, we waited and watched the switcher, watched the count down from master control. The producer, looking at her computer trying to rearrange the show to figure out where to put all the stories we didn't run, now yells, "Let's just go to weather!" --- Dan

I was cutting a three hour live Breakfast show when the entire monitor wall went black. The only monitor we had that still worked was a TV set showing our channel, sitting on the directors desk. The show was a tight format of news and interviews using eight robotic and manned cameras, so we just continued to cut cameras, roll and take tapes, insert keys bugs etc. as normal, hoping all the operators were giving us what we needed but with no chance to actually see what we were cutting to. We could only look at the TV set to make sure we were doing the right thing after we did it. This went on for about 20 minutes until the engineer could run an extension cord down the hall to a live circuit and get the monitor wall back up. Not one bad thing went to air.

Back when we had a 4 channel Profile on my home truck, we had contracted to do a high school regional game. Powered up the Profile...nothing. It was totally dead. The next week we had an EVS installed. A couple months ago, I was TDing a men's college volleyball game. About 15 minutes in, we look up at the return feed from the station and see only snow. The station lost a leg of its power, which included master control and all tape machines. Apparently the backup genny still "saw" power, so it never kicked on. We weren't recording a copy in the truck, either, until 10 minutes later. So now we have to make up the game...but at least I get to try my hand at directing this one...

In college we did the games for our college cable station, while there are too many stories, this one still comes back to me, cause I now work with one of the guys, and we still reminisce about it occasionally. We went to tape a baseball game at another college about 2 hours away, so we went in the day before to run the cables to all the cameras, audio & PL lines, & such. The next day, we get up early (& hung over of course), go back to the stadium to set up the switcher, CG, tape machines, cameras, etc. Everything is going smoothly, we've got all cameras synced, everyone can talk to everyone, talent sits down and they can talk and hear (I think we had some sorta IFB system too), audio sounds great, mind you this was all jerry-rigged, with a tarp over us so we could see the monitors with the 90 degree sun beating down on us. We are about 5 mins to air, we're all ready to hit record, when all of a sudden everything goes out on us. No power. We're looking at every power cable we've got, making sure it's plugged in, nothing has changed. The stadium has lost power (not a big stadium, just a few bleachers, and vendors). There was a construction crew behind us working while we were setting up, but had stopped because of the game. They saw us scrambling, and offered us their small portable generator. We said "SURE!" So the next 15 - 20 mins of us were us scrambling to run power cables back to all the cameras, and to our "control room." After we got 2 cameras up, we all looked at each other waiting for the rest of the cameras, when the announcers heard themselves in their ears, and said, "are we up, I can hear myself, I guess we're back." So they started announcing, and the director started cutting cameras. Apparently, center field was so far away, that camera 4 was on a different power supply, so he had been shooting the entire time, thinking that he had just lost PL. The other 2 cameras came up eventually and we did the game. Later we find out that we were draining so much power, that when the venders came in to start serving pop corn, hot dogs, and drinks, they powered up and took us all out cause we were all on the same power. The vendors never came up. And we rented a generator the next time we went on location. I've got more, but I'll get to those eventually. --- Dan

not really an equipment failure, but we were live during prime time news and i heard a rumbling in the ceiling above me. a little after our headlines, a panel in the ceiling falls to the floor behind me and i look up to find our engineer looking down at me through the hole in the ceiling. for a few seconds we maintain silent eye contact before i go to a package. the only words that came out of his mouth were "oops" as a nice cloud of dust particles (asbestos?) rain down on me as well as the switcher. market 167 was frustrating.

Sure!! 50 bonus points for kpl They can be redeemed for any swag of your choice

Thanks for the insight. After being in TV for so long, I react with the same strange, almost "sickening" feeling when I see anything go wrong with a live show....even if I'm at home watching! Do I get bonus points for figuring out the switching with the router? :)

I'm here working the show. I'm switching the pre/half/post game stuff. Front row switches during the 2 minute break. Here's the story. Stood up to move. Game TD sat down. As they came back from break to SlashCamera with scorebox, the switcher lost Frame Com. Nothing would happen. First they had the camera do game as the FoxBox was inserted from Houston. EIC then moved the ISO router in front of the Director to cut the game while they tried to get the switcher up. It took about 10 minutes I figure to get it back up. About 5 reboots. No idea why it went down. Update: EIC thinks it might have been a problem with the connection from the back of the switcher. He ran a new CAT5 cable and it's been solid ever since

Watching the Cal-UCLA game from Staples Center on Fox Sports. For awhile duirng the 2nd half, the coverage only consisted of the game camera. A bit later, I'm venturing to guess they're switching through a router. Only camera cuts, no CG, no scorebox or replays. Hope someone will have an interesting tale to tell about this one. :) OK, 7 minutes into the half and the scorebox is back. And so are the replays. And gone is Cal's big lead.....

I did a show about 2 weeks ago and the truck showed up 30 minutes before the show. The one that was going to be there couldnt make it and they had to call another one 3 hours away. Good for us the venue was wired and we just had to hustle stuff inside fast. I was trying to build a few effects in commercials. CRAZY

Mine didnt happen to me... One of our TDs raised the control panel of the Kalypso during a commercial to reset the board. The hydraulics got stuck somehow, and the panel WOULD NOT CLOSE. She switched the entire show standing on a stool upside down...its still funny...

[quote="Steve Meyer"]Let's see...GVG 300s in Sacramento news. KXTV or KOVR?[/quote] Hee, hee, heh! KXTV What's really gonna suck, is going back into the old booth while the Sony gets upgraded to HD. --Don

Let's see...GVG 300s in Sacramento news. KXTV or KOVR?

Just finished posting it..didn't realize this would be viewed so quickly

Don, You mentioned you posted a help request in the Sony forum. The last post I see in that forum from you is clear back in November. Did I miss it somewhere else? RE

OK, yesterday we just made the transition from our old GVG 300 to our new Sony MVS-8000. My show today had a couple of kinks in it, no big deal. But our evening TD had a bit more trouble (non switcher related) For those in News - we use Avid iNews, Control Air Server, Airspace. All playout is digital. Last nigh's 5pm was the first On-Air show for the new control room. Here is an email snippet from the TD (with his permission).... **************************** Hi Don, did you see the 5pm? It didn?t exactly go smooth as silk. I was in the control room, feverishly working. There are a lot of new things to check, new places to check, new routers to route, new monitors to route, making sure plasmas were correct, making sure effects that were corrupted the day before were now back and working, blah blah blah. I was on a bit of a nervous edge yesterday with the new switcher. Then??literally? seconds before we were to go live for the first time with the new control room, all tapes vanished. The scenario: 25 seconds away from headlines I?m smiling (it?s a nervous smile, but a smile). 20 seconds away from headlines the alarm level begins rising as I?m wondering why all the tape monitors just went black. 15 seconds from headlines the alarm level reaches ?elevated? and the nervous smile is wiped clean away as I notice the GUI says the tapes are cued and ready but when I quickly begin presetting the tapes and hitting play to see if the tapes are really there, I just see black. 10 seconds before headlines, the alarm level reaches ?panic? as all the tapes in the GUI one by one start lighting up red ?unavailable?. 5 seconds from headlines people walking in a park down the street from the station hear a technical director scream ?WE HAVE NO TAPES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!? Fading up from black into headlines the profanities begin blasting out of the TD?s mouth as his left hand feverishly scrolls back and forth through the X-Keys GUI, but all the tapes are just ?gone?. Now into headlines with no tapes and no where to go, and with anchors tossing to tapes that aren?t there and pausing for opens that aren?t there, and not knowing whether to go to live shots we have no packages for, the producer and director weigh in with their own profanity outbursts. The TD has since stopped swearing however. He?s crying. It wouldn?t be live TV without a nice last second crisis. Apparently the control air server spontaneously decided to shut itself down, then reboot. What was that Murphy?s Law said? Something about the worst possible time? ********************************* BTW..for those who switch on a Sony 8000, I posted a topic in the Sony Switcher forum, we could use anybody's input on this one

30 min to air in the 1st of 4 games for ESPN womens NCAA tourny.... ME3 on a GV3k crashes...no problem swap card with ME1 make some minor fixes...no blood spilled. Card swapped, sucess! 10min to air that card dies! Now realize what EVER YOU PUT IN me3'S SLOT IS FRYING IT! Change the whole show to go thu ME2 with seconds to air and somehow get through the entire day with 1ME and PGM/PST....every emem I called up I just help my breath hoping it would work....not a fun day. "So you want to be a TD huh?"

OK - This happened just this past weekend. Maybe not as dramatic as some of the ones posted here, but still a bad equipment failure. The trucks A/C would not start up at all. We went out and bought fans to circulate air as best as we could. Halfway thru the basketball game we noticed equipment starting to fail. The Icom started to dropout, where the A1 could not hear cues and was missing elements. Then decks started dropping etc. The final straw was when the Monitor wall dropped out. We were counting to break, when every monitor but Pgm/Pst and my 6 M/E monitors went out. We went to break (1.5 mins) and started to plan to use the M/E monitors to get thru the rest of the game. As we came back from break, the monitors all turned on and stayed on for the rest of the game. The EIC could only say "it must be the heat".

Matt's post about the 100 on top of the 200 (does that make a 300?) made me think of this. I had a Kalypso that missed its call time last year. No matter what we did, NO FRAME COM was all we could get. Since the truck was a Dual Feed truck, the EIC checked the small panel and it was awake, so he took it out and put it on top of the big panel. (we covered it with Duvetyne to protect it) The show went off without a hitch. At the end of the show, when we pulled the little switcher off the big one, big brother was happily humming along in switcherville, mocking us with its fully functioning panel. Fun with Pixels! Scott

I recently did a Jay Leno style show with our fly pack system, in a theater. One of those shows where the crew was too small and the schedule was too tight. There were some pretty heavy thunderstorms during load in. Rehearsals started around 2:00, and I was still patching things together. 10 minutes into rehearsals, a part of the plaster ceiling fell on the drummer?s head. After 30 minutes they decided to keep going? We managed to get everything done and the show started on time. About 15 minuets from the end of the show I start feeling water dripping on me. The wind had started blowing rain horizontal into an air vent above our control area back stage. The TD finished the show holding an umbrella, and someone found some tarps to cover my engineering / tape area. Just nuts!

During an extremely rare snow flurry in San Antonio many years ago, our assignments editor ran into a live sports cast with a snow ball, nailing our surprised sports anchor with the ball. He kept going even though surprised and laughing.

[quote="Mustang"]Finally not an equipment failure, but we had an reporter on her way out to the chroma key during a show when she stepped on a camera cable, slipped badly and hit her head on the floor knocking her out cold. On the air both anchors stood up in the middle of their reads on a 2 shot pointing across the studio at her. The floor director rushed to her aid! The anchors sat back down still reading the script out of the prompter without missing a word.[/quote] Related story....former NFL Tight End Russ Francis tripped and fell during a newscast in the middle of doing sports hilights as he walked back to the anchor desk about 10 years ago in Hawaii, hit his head on the floor, and had to be taken to the hospital. Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to keep the aircheck. :(

The HD truck blowing up sounds like NMT HD10 two seasons ago on opening day. I seem to remember that the Giants broadcast took the other show until things got running. We had a now out of commission NMT truck pop the main breakers just as we were about to do the lovely Fox "poparound" several years back. It was great resetting everything ASAP after we got power....

I heard this from Scott Mcquade, and I don't remember what game it was. Setting up for a baseball game in a new HD truck for three days and everyone in the truck kept saying they smelled burning plastic. The EIC said it was just the truck breakin in... Three hours before game time a transformer blew. Flames were reportedly shooting out from under the truck! It was completely dark until the 7th inning, when a new transformer was installed. One of my fellow TDs came from Arizona where their station was directly hit by lightening. ME1 on the switcher sparked, popped and then badly smoked through 2/3rds of their show. The director reccomended not using ME1;) Finally not an equipment failure, but we had an reporter on her way out to the chroma key during a show when she stepped on a camera cable, slipped badly and hit her head on the floor knocking her out cold. On the air both anchors stood up in the middle of their reads on a 2 shot pointing across the studio at her. The floor director rushed to her aid! The anchors sat back down still reading the script out of the prompter without missing a word.

Hey Mike, I do it the exact same way. The problem was on the first day, the 9pin connector for the tele monitor was broken, so we never got it running. It was fixed the 2nd day. Thank goodness for macros!!!

Not really an on-air failure, but funny just the same. Was doing a women's college volleyball game for the local cable outfit about 2 years ago. They had purchased a used GVG-200-2 for use in their truck that had been pretty solid...until this particular day when I showed-up to punch the game. The 200 was dark, and they didn't have any of the extender cards or diagnostic gear to get it running again. Hearing all of this before I entered the truck, imagine my suprise when I walked in to find a GVG-100 sitting on top of the 200! Well, that's what we used to get the show on TV. Weeks later, they yanked their Ross RVS-630 out of their studio so they could have a "bigger" switcher in the truck. The day they lit that switcher up in the truck, a few caps blew, so I had no lights or indicators on the switcher at all. I could switch, just no ability to see where I was... ;-) Great stuff, guys! Keep it coming! Matt

Sound real fun Lou, I stripped down to just my shorts in a truck in Texas last year when we lost AC. It was summer but luckily the truck was parked in the shade. Scott

Not really equipment crash and burn on air...but...I've had a recent string of air conditioners going broke. Wondering at what point you just leave the truck? Does someone have to pass out? My last show in Las Vegas the truck only had 10 tons worth of A/C, and spot coolers all throughout the mouseholes. Tape room was in the 90s, production in the 80s. Is this an OSHA violation? I think everyone being freelance is too scared just to up and leave. At some point equipment begins to go...the DVEous routinely gives the "Chassis Is Too Hot! Switch It Off Now!" warning, just waiting for something major to go.

[quote="Mike Cumbo"]I also remember hearing about an XFL game that went down because the genny guy didn't check fuel levels.[/quote] Mike I did the back up game to that XFL game that lost power. It's also kinda of funny that I also did a Japanese Feed on another NBC game... the Orange Bowl many years ago that lost power during the game. No I had nothing to do with it, but it was before they had a mandate for a back up genny on some of their shows. Anyway the story goes like this, NBC went off the air and they scrambled to get New York announcers ready. Meanwhile the poor Japanese feed had two cameras and several feeds from NBC .... NBC came to us and New York actually took our feed of one camera and Japanese announcers as they got it all sorted out. It was amuzing to see the powerplay between with the Japanese people and how they had one game coverage camera (which wasn't even in a normal "up" position) and a talent camera and they insisted on putting their announcers on camera which made it to NBC's air. Hey I was just the TD!!!! Oddly enough, I had been directing a Orange Bowl Preview Show earlier in the week at the same stadium. We had several power issues and had lost power several times during set up and during our taping. The Japanese never lost power during the game. But this is part of the reason why genny backups came about in the first place. Cheers, Rick.

[quote="Mike Cumbo"]I also remember hearing about an XFL game that went down because the genny guy didn't check fuel levels.[/quote] Every time we get a new person in the Finance department, we get a red flag raised about scandalous levels of fuel being used by one particular vehicle - they always suspect fraud or someone syphoning off the diesel for private use. We have to explain it's a generator truck, and it runs on diesel, and yes, that's how much fuel it uses.

Jeremy, that is why I always use a source hold on my tele and use a background generator to color it. I make sure that video or engineering has it through at least a DA or frame sync so that THEY can bring the levels up to where they belong and I'm not adjusting key levels. Bob, having a genny is great as long as the genny works. Last baseball season debris blew into the air intake of the genny powering an ESPN baseball game killing the genny. Opps, maybe the screens on the air intakes should have been on??? I also remember hearing about an XFL game that went down because the genny guy didn't check fuel levels.

One game during this past hockey season the home truck showed up with a dead switcher. Quoth the EIC: "It's so dead I'm not even worried about it, no way is it coming back up." Both home and away truck had Kalypsos, so the engineers got together and formulated a plan to genlock the two trucks and do it like a backwards dual feed, with home stealing an M/E off away's switcher. The plan was aborted when the switcher came back online a couple hours before showtime. They did without FF on that show, they used the old FSN DVEous wipe. I was doing video for HDNet one dark and stormy night. Most of the crew was at dinner and I was hanging out in the truck doing some reading. All of a sudden the CD that audio was playing stopped and I looked up and saw the entire monitor wall do one giant sync roll. A lightning bolt somewhere had caused a power hit throughout the entire building, the crew in the dining hall had seen the lights flicker before I ran in to tell them what had happened. Thankfully everything came back up just fine, but the sight of the entire monitor wall doing a sync roll at the same time still sticks with me for some reason.

Years ago when I was with ABC, we were doing the Academy Awards at the Dorthy Chandler Pavillion in Los Angeles. ABC brought in 3 trucks: the main switching truck, the effects switching truck, & a VTR truck. Each truck drew 200 AMPS. The "honcho" TD (today's equivalent of a tech manager) was responsible for ordering the appropriate amount of power to the trucks. He ordered 600 AMP service. The night before air as we were in the middle of dress rehearsal, we suddenly lost power to all trucks. We were down for about 1 or 2 hours as they re-routed the 3-phase & tried to determine what happened to cause such a catestrauphic failure & make sure that it didn't happen on-air. It turns out that we were on the same power leg as the lobby of the theater itself. A cleaning lady had been sprucing up the lobby and had plugged in & turned on a vacuum cleaner. We were "that close" to the edge of the 600 AMP service that a Hoover put us over the top & took us down. On the plus side, that became the start of ABC's standard policy to use back-up generators for all of their big remotes.

As much as I'd like to blame the equipment on this one, I just can't. Coming back for the second day of a three day baseball stand, we finally get the tele working. I adjust the levels so it looks good, then MOD MOD all my effects. Top of the first inning I run my replay, and PGM PST doesn't cut. Yeah, my thoughts exactly. Fix it in the commercial break. Oh wait, we have a money reel today. I end up undercutting manually for an inning while I think of how to fix it. Then it takes me two more innings to add an ME-3 Cut macro to my timeline. Gotta love money reels!!!

Okay. I love the DD35 / XtenDD switcher... BUT: I once worked with a TD who thought she had a corrupt application. You see... she couldn't explain why sometimes she'd load her config, and everything would be fine, and then other times the switcher would "crash" after loading. Sometimes it would crash right away... Other times, it would wait until she was in the middle of her show, and then it would "crash" forceing her to stay on whatever source she was on, until break. No one from our station, nor the GVG/Thompson people could figure it out, at least innitally-- until one day one of the DD35 original engineers looked at her application and noticed that upon every 18th load of her application, the swithcer would crash. The engineer was puzzled and then remembered; at one point, he had put into this particular version of the software to "crash" (for some reason) every 18th time a config was loaded. Somehow, it worked out that she was always the one that got the 18th load. The engineer told us that he forgot to take that particular command out of the code. The engineer said, with a big grin on his face, "Well, not everyone's perfect." Long live "Lucky Number 18!"

Scott, my Fast Forward started burping around 6:15 as we were voicing billboards and packaging some elements that use the FF. The EIC reseated the bottom drive and rebooted the blasted box. It worked perfectly until we halfway through this bump effect that our hoops people love. Suddenly no keycutter, you see a camera with a VTR shrunk and positioned. GRRR Another reboot kept it happy until we went to black. I am glad that I am not the next TD on the truck and that I will not see that FF until at least Tuesday.

I like that one. Simply devilish. By the way, I have no idea why my posts are showing up twice. I swear I am only pushing the button once. once. Scott P.S. ME 3 keyer 2 died last night about 3 minutes into a Basketball game. My EIC was quite amused watching me try to figure out why the Fox Box would not key or anything else, dancing through menus and sources while trying to hear the director as well. I guess I thought it was funny after the game. I modified the first and last keyframe of the replay move to replace the Fast Forward with font 1 and put the Box in keyer 1 on ME 3. Director and TD are now both happy. About 6 minutes into the 2nd half, the keyer suddenly starts working again. Gremlins!

Speaking of engineers with no sense of humor, I just heard a story today about some camera guys who put a handheld on the ground then held some saran wrap in front of the lens. Then they gave some kid a sharpie and had him start scribbling on the saran wrap so it looked like he was writing on the lens. The engineer watching in the truck was not amused. They had a hard camera op and a tape op in on it too, the recorded him running into the arena. The footage is sharing a tape with some basketball highlights.

About 10-12 years back the regional net that I was working for had us cover an AHL game using a truck owned by a sister company. All is well through two periods, shortly into the third as I take push a button on the 1680 the lights flicker and then black... This small truck didn't have a Telos for the AD, so she had a handset and she says "master just said that we went to black" with a laugh in her voice. I thought the producer was going to reach through the phone line and kill the master control joker. We never did finish that game, the power bay was BBQ'd. Kinda weird going into an arena while the game is still going on and watching the camera ops strike their cameras. We had that truck packed quicker then ever since half of the gear was ready to be packed 20 minutes after the game ended. Ahh, TV was simpler then, no DVE's or DDR's. The CG didn't make sound. Good old fashioned five camera hockey.

The first remote I ever did, a tape show and I have a VR1200 and an AVR2 to record with. The head on the 1200 is frozen and they have no spare. The AVR2 works but tension is all messed up and to get it rolling, I have to assist the supply reel by hand. We start the show with 3 of 4 cameras working but one dies. The engineers determine that one dead camera is a head problem, one a CCU, so they can combine the working parts and make a third camera. Unfortunately, they pull the wrong cable off the back of the CCU and completely kill one of the 2 working cameras. So we are down to one, and the producers give up and walk away. It had nowhere to go but up from there. Scott, the unamused engineer didn't have the initials JC, did he? He has little or no sense of humor, in my experience.

I had a switcher die during prepro for a soccer game one day. I sent the crew to lunch and asked the director to give the EIC some alone time with the truck. After lunch we had PGM/PST and ME1 available. 2 and 3 were DOA. I took great delight in covering ME2 & 3 with white tape with DO NOT TOUCH written on it. The director came in and said " I don't like the looks of this". We had a great show and he was pleased. I still thought the tape was funny. The EIC just humphed. Scott

I was doing IMAG for a conference. I was testing all of my video equipment when my switcher outputs (different aux and program feeds for different screens) kept randomly turning into that lovely SDI staticky green. This kept happening through switcher reboots, so we hooked up our powerpoint machine straight to the projectors and did without cameras for the time being. Never did figure out was caused it, we just sent the hardware back under warranty. There was also a time on a very cold Minnesota winter night when the cameras refused to sync up. I think the blackburst generator didn't like the cold, because the next shoot everything worked fine and the outside temperature was the only difference. With the cameras hooked up to genlock they just kept sync rolling. We ended up disconnecting genlock and making it cuts-only, and as few cuts as possible. Had an almost-catastrophe recently doing a hockey show. Fuses in two of the CCUs blew a couple hours beforehand. Sent a runner out to buy some more fuses and the cameras worked for the show. Someone told me once that my PL had bled into program audio as a joke, I nearly had a heart attack. I'm not usually a screamer, but it was a rather inexperienced crew that day.

Not crash and burn equipment failure, but I had a fuse blow on a 3k that only effected the lights on M/E 3. I quickly realized how easy it is to switch with one's eyes closed.

Doing college softball a couple years back, suddenly program went to black. I swung my eyes over to the switcher the same time the director yelled at me to take 4, to see no lights on at all. Yelling for the engineer to come to production, slowly the ME's came back to life. I found out after the show the eic had slid his toolbox across the floor; straight into the power switch on the power supply

I once worked a show that never made air because the truck didn't work. nothing worked.. no pl, no tally, no piece of equipment was timed, no control room speakers, no IFB.... it was eerie at 1pm when the game started and we were all just sitting there in silence. by 2pm we had the truck packed up and we were heading for the bar.

Technically not on-air, but a tape-delayed failure. Years ago we did a kids-league baseball game that I directed. The format was double-elimination and as it turned out, they had to play a second game after a rain delay. So we're watching little kids try to play baseball after midnight in the second game of what had become a double header. Our analyst left in the middle of the show to catch a plane. Everyone on the crew was appropriately annoyed with the whole situation. And to top it off, when I got the tapes back to the station and loaded reel 1, I discovered that rain had shorted something and most of the PL had bled into the audio track. So I spent the rest of the night editing all the f-bombs and other inappropriate chatter (2-inch quad, mind you) so we could air something that might not cause us to lose our sponsor or license or our jobs. Which was probably worse than the fire in the truck during Monday Night Baseball. Which was probably worse than losing all our D to A audio converters on a dual and trying to do a pregame show with only mics and a digicart. Which was not as bad as later when the network cable fell out of the mini-panel on the same dual truck and we had no switcher at all until that problem was figured out (although the panel was nice enough to inform us that it had "NO COMMUNICATION"). Which was about as bad as the time more rain shorted more stuff and my PL ended up right there in the mix with the announcers during an open. No talent fee paid, either, although I did a very nice toss to break. I won't even mention exploding Duets That's a no-brainer. mg

I was TDing a Boston Red Sox game about three years ago, about the 4th inning I looked up and every tally on every monitor lit up. I called the EIC and had no sooner asked him what was going on when the switcher died. This particular truck was based in a coastal area and the salty air had apparently caused some corrosion in the 5 volt power supply. The cable is about as thick as a finger and had finally eaten through. No backup power supply. The router i front of the director was the only router in the front of the truck capable of cutting a source without thre button pushes. The director cut the show on the router, I went back and held a flashlight for the EIC. The maintenance guy called a local air conditioning guy who had low voltage/high amperage cable that would work. We were back on the air with the switcher by the 7th inning. Great work by the engineers getting us back up. The client was not happy about the failure but understanding. I've never been paid so much to hold a flashlight before. Scott

Is this a failure or operator error, you decide. There was a telecast of a pro sports game, in the truck everything is going well however unknown to the production team is that someone in engineering/transmission hit the transmission router. For a period of time, at least 15 minutes, master control did not notice the problem. The truck was notified by the son of one of the talent who called or text messaged his dad.

We do a news show for another affilate in our market which we feed through a fiber line. The show was going fine when all of a sudden i look at off air and realize there is a frame of our anchor frozen. We had audio but the video was locked. We try to call the other station to have them roll to break, and there is no answer. we eventually killed the anchors mic and sat on the freeze frame for what seemed forever, at least 45 seconds or more, before the other station finally rolled to break. We get ready to come back from break and the next show rolls. Apparently the station took a power hit, it caused their framstore to lock on the frame and killed their server, that had to put up a back up spot reel. Of course the tech guys though it was hilarious, the news department wasn't as thrilled.

This is gonna sound kinda lame after those two stories, but I haven't been in the business long enough to witness anything truly awful. My worst was when I used to be a floor director for local morning news and we had a musical guest. We had two floor directors who traded hours running prompter and flooring, the sound check was during a commercial break in my hour on the floor. I left the vocalist's monitor wedge powered on and let the other floor person know when we switched places for the next hour. When the segment rolled around, they came up to the performer on camera and rolled the music track, and she just stood there for about 20 seconds until we figured out there was no sound coming from the wedge and went to break. The wedge had been powered down and the other floor director hadn't done it, but we noticed a guilty look on the anchor's face. She must have thought she was turning it on when she hit the button. Lesson: You do not let the talent touch ANYTHING. I've got a few other stories of things going awry, but nothing that made the air.