Live, Live, Live

In the news business there is one word that sets the tone for a newscast...LIVE.

There are few newcasts without a Live Report from the field somewhere.

And with the November ratings period creeping up on us we can probably consider October as just a warm up...



Of my recent Live adventures around the triad the story behind these pictures sticks out. A teen driver rear ended a car that was waiting to make a left turn. The two passengers in the bed of his pickup truck were thrown to the ground as the truck slid into another car.



The boys were all taken to the nearest trauma center by a medical helicopter and we were all over it.

These pictures were from our follow up coverage the day after the wreck. We had figured out that this intersection has a bad history. The grandmother of the boys had a serious wreck there and 3 other relatives of this same family died in a Christmas (Eve or Day I think) wreck at this intersection.



With the community crying out for a stoplight or at least a flashing caution light it was our duty to spend the 5 and 6 o'clock hour broadcasting the facts from the intersection itself.

The shot from our mast camera 50 or so feet up made the Live Shots better than the ordinary brick wall shot.



I was just thankful that it didn't turn into another one of these.


(Happens about 35 seconds in.)

There was one minor major snafu on this day. Our converter box that changes the firewire digital video signal to analog quit working. Nothing I could do would make it pass a signal. To make it worse I didn't have a backup firewire cable preventing me from passing the firewire signal through my XD Camera. (the Firewire Cables in the truck are routed neatly and unavailable for rigging)

But, alas, Caron had a portable USB device and with our SNG (Sattelite) Truck just 5 miles down the road I devised a plan. The other crew was also reporting about the wreck but they were LIVE from the boys' school.

I exported the story from the laptop to the Gigatick and was going to ask a member of the other crew to drive their newscar to us but we had an off duty deputy that had stopped by to chat with us while he was on his way to an off duty job and since he would be passing by the other LIVE location I sent him on his way with the lead story for 6 o'clock.

(It was great cooperation between the media and law enforcement, unlike in EWink's problems in Vegas.)

I think the other crew was surprised to see a deputy pull up at their Live location with our story in hand because they talked about it for days.