The Degree Show

The Degree show 2014 has began. It started on a really stressful way. At one hour to go we could not get the audio to work on both of the encoders as well as been pushed in last minute to be the only presentation operator. This was putting a lot of pressure on the team. We had been working hard for the past 3 moths to possibly lose everything on the show day but we could not permit that. We had to step up and we did. I leant as quick as I could the play out system while Aidan with the help of Ryan and Lee were trying to fix the audio problem as we as trying to make 5.1 work. I needed to play something before our live at 1PM so they could detect the audio and fix the problem. At 15min to go manage to make everything work.

Another problem was me being drafted in as only presentation operator I wasn't fully aware of what had been QC'd so it happened that I played something that wasn't QC'd and it had illegal colours, which both Martyn and Martin made me noticed. Luckily we had a ligalizer with us so we made our TX go through that and it fixed it.

Simon and engineer form Arqiva came to test our signal and he noticed that we were outputting at a really low wattage. This was because while we were testing the system we did not save the settings so when we turn the transmitter back on it had the old setting. So we were able to put it back to 5 watts.

The transmission came to an end on wednesday. Through out this experience I've leant a lot, experienced a lot of feelings and faced many difficulties but I am really satisfied with the outcome even though we faced many problems we managed to deliver the show and add something new lie 5.1 dolby digital transmission. what I can say is that time management is important for projects like this and I wish I could realised this before it was too late but is something I have on board now. Planning as well is essential, with many redundancy plan as you can I've learnt that they can never be many. At the end it brought out of me confidence, something I was lacking a lot. It was a great experience and I'm grateful for it.