Elections 2020

Technical

This was a special OB since it involved two OB units being used, a lot more cameras than a regular OB, and the VideoHub two to a lack of capacity on the ATEM. OB2 handled our main stream whilst OB1 handled the YUSU stream which played out graphics in The Lounge.

Technical Issues

Power delivery

Upon arrival of The Lounge with the OB units the tech team made the discovery that the outlet in the wall we had connected the OB unit to lacked any electricity. So we then proceeded to swap to the other outlet on the other side of the wall, this one did work and until the moment when we had planned to go live everything was going well until we managed to blow a fuse in one of the sockets. It turned out that it was not a good idea to run nearly all of our equipment on two outlets, we were able to quickly resolve this issue by swapping the fuse and Tech Soc providing us one of their 16A outlets. This had also sadly caused the stream to die, which required Rhys to jog all the way to courtyard where it had been playing out but had died to the connection loss. In addition, when the OB units were switched back on we were struck with an OS not found screen on our graphics computer for OB2, this caused great distress, but it turned out that a USB had been left in the computer that was originally being used to transfer the embargoed graphics but it had also been used previously to boot an OS which we didn't realise at first. Upon discovery, a quick unplug, a power-on and we were back in action.

Networking

There was significant issues that occurred in regards to networking. Firstly, the laptops were connected through WiFi which displeased Matthew and Andrew greatly. This was likely caused by the fact the A/V control software kept on disconnecting, a better WiFi AP would probably have resolved this slight issue. Rhys attempted to resolve this by connecting them all to OB2's switch but this resulted in the laptop's unable to get IP addresses. This was not ideal. It appeared that none of the laptop's could discover the DHCP server, reasons are still unknown to this day, although it was likely a faulty config file made by Rhys and a DNS server issue. So in order to resolve this issue we had to setup each laptop to use a static IP address instead which thankfully resolved the lack of connectivity and allowed us to vision mix to our hearts content.

The OB unit that wasn't grounded

During setup of the computing infrastructure Rhys had first noticed this issue when plugging in equipment into OB1 but didn't let it phase him thinking it was just a static shock. That happened early during the setup, so after all the extra equipment had been plugged in it had caused this shock to be left a little bit more. Rhys was attempting to plug an SDI cable in from OB1 complaining that there was an issue with it but sadly his cries were disregarded by Andrew and Ben saying that they experience it all the time in the studio! After enough complaining by Rhys, Andrew attempted the final connection of the SDI cable, thinking it was fine at first then ZAP! He reeled in pain and then the tech team decided it wasn't a good idea to use that OB unit anymore so we had to quickly deploy Marty the third OB unit which up until now was reserved until emergencies. So it was quickly prepped for graphics playout where it was then discovered it didn't have any graphics software installed, so Rhys and Ben worked against the clock to get it ready to playout graphics! Luckily it was setup and did its job without fault.