• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Events

 

Hot Shot

Nov 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Story by Bill Miller
Photos by David Egy

Producing interactive television for NASCAR HotPass.

Dave Fields uses a a Sony HDC-1500 with a Canon KJ 20x8.5B KRS zoom lens to capture the action in the pits for DirecTV’s NASCAR HotPass telecast.

It's 9 o'clock in the morning on race day at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon. Twelve members of DirecTV's NASCAR HotPass production team are sardined into a small production office in a 50ft. mobile trailer. Outside, lightning crackles and the rain pours down. On everyone's mind — producers, directors, on-air announcers — is what to do if the rain continues. They go live in a few hours, but the race won't be run on a wet track. It's not one broadcast they have to worry about, but four separate telecasts on four channels, which go out to HotPass subscribers. Narrowcasting on satellite channels 795, 796, 797, and 798 in both SD and HD, HotPass offers viewers what it boasts is “a full-sensory experience of being at the track, in pit row, and behind the wheel.” And it lives up to the advertising. For 36 weeks during the race season, HotPass assigns production teams to four of the top drivers. Viewers get to choose which channel to watch, or they can flip back and forth during the race. It's truly where the future of telecasting is going, giving the audience more choices to select exactly what they want to watch.

Television at NASCAR is a huge undertaking every Sunday. There are seven or eight television productions coming out of a particular race. The television compound is a sight to behold: more than 30 trucks that move from racetrack to racetrack each week. More than 650 technicians, on-air personnel, producers, directors, and caterers swarm the TV village.

Among them is Tim Deroin, one of four HotPass producers, affectionately known as “TV Tim.” A former racecar driver himself, Deroin is passionate about his job. “There is a production trailer which consists of four compartments, what we call pods — individual control rooms that handle the programming on a particular channel,” he says. “A second trailer houses the audio mixers, robotic camera operators, and video technical personnel. In the main production unit, each pod has a technical director, a producer, a broadcast assistant, and an EVS operator.”

If you think the action is hot on the track, you need only stand in the hallway of the production trailer for a few minutes during the race. A cacophony fills the air as four producers call shots simultaneously, each concentrating on his or her individual driver — Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Greg Biffle, and Jimmie Johnson, to name a few. It's a wild, seemingly chaotic scene, but within each pod, there is a sense of control.

The Wednesday before each race, Executive Producer Chris Long, who pioneered the project, picks the four drivers to be followed on race day. “The goal is be a able to give the viewer the ability to watch the drivers they care about the most and not have to listen to anything else,” he says. Every Sunday, he monitors all four channels either onsite or back at the Los Angeles Broadcast Center.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.