The Academy Awards, aka “The Oscars”: The most-watched primetime entertainment telecast of the season.
As the media server programmer from AEON Point, I was behind the MA3 console. I was running a sockpuppet workflow controlling a Disguise system with 20+ active 4K outputs, cueing hundreds of pieces of video content, while also rapidly switching between multiple timecode sources and taking most cues manually.
Jason Rudolph spent months as Screens Producer working with the content and creative teams, making sure every piece of video was built to highlight the nominated films and serve the stage design, while ensuring they were delivered in executable formats. Tim Nauss engineered a fully redundant signal path, fail-over ready at a single dropped frame.
What always amazes me for these large scale broadcast shows is the level of redundancy and precision in every step of the process.
The question wasn’t only “Can I program this show, and run it live without error?” - It was also “Are we prepared for every scenario where something goes wrong, to make sure the audience never knows?”
That’s a much harder question, and it changes everything about how you think going into the show.
Photos courtesy of AMPAS