A Harvest Concert, Four Cameras and One Dropped Feed

Marcus runs events for a small arts trust, and in the first week of October he phoned us with a plain request. The trust was staging a harvest concert in a large marquee, and a regional channel had agreed to carry the second half live. He had a venue, a stage plan and a broadcaster's technical sheet that he admitted he only half understood.

I said we would visit before anything else. A live broadcast from a tent is a different job from one in a studio, because nothing about the space is fixed. The ground is soft, the power comes from a generator, and the walls move when the wind rises. Marcus wanted a crew he could trust to deal with all of that, and a single person to talk to. That is what our on-site support is for, and I took the job myself.

We walked the marquee on a dry weekday afternoon with Marcus and the venue's caretaker. The stage faced the long side of the tent, which put the cameras far from the audience's centre line. The generator sat close to the planned camera positions, and the cable route to the outside broadcast vehicle crossed the main entrance.

None of this was a surprise, but all of it needed a decision. We moved the vehicle to the rear of the tent, rerouted the cable overhead where it could not be tripped on, and asked for a separate power feed for the video equipment. Sharing a supply with the stage lighting is how interference creeps in, and it is far easier to prevent than to trace on the night.

• Vehicle and cabling moved away from the public entrance
• Separate power for video and audio equipment
• Camera positions marked on the ground with tape

For a concert of this size we proposed four cameras and a crew of six: a vision mixer, a sound lead, three operators and a runner who also handled intercom checks. Marcus asked whether that was more than he needed. I explained that the sixth person was the one who would never appear on screen but would matter most if something went wrong.

We briefed the operators the evening before, using the trust's running order. Each knew which musician they would follow and which shots the director wanted for the choir. A short briefing sounds modest, yet it is what lets operators work calmly when a soloist steps forward unannounced. We also agreed a spoken code for fixing problems so that nobody shouted across the intercom.

The first half passed without incident, which is how a rehearsal day should look. Shortly after the interval, the link carrying the picture to the broadcaster dropped for several seconds. The cause was a connector knocked loose when a stagehand moved a monitor, a small fault of the kind that ends careers in the wrong hands.

Because the runner had been walking the cable routes every twenty minutes, she reached the fault within moments. The vision mixer cut to a held graphic, the sound carried on, and viewers at home saw a brief pause rather than a black screen. The picture returned before the choir had finished its introduction. Nobody in the audience knew anything had happened, and Marcus said afterwards that this was the part he had worried about most.

• Held graphic ready for any loss of picture
• Runner assigned to cable checks throughout the show

Back at the workshop on Southgate Works, we wrote up the evening as we do with every live job. The connector was fitted with a locking sleeve for future events, and the monitor stand was moved out of the stagehands' usual path. These are small changes, but a crew that records them builds a calmer next show.

For Marcus, the lasting point was that the broadcast succeeded because of decisions made days earlier, not because of anything clever on the night. The site visit, the separate power, the briefing and the sixth crew member all did their work quietly. When a live show runs well, the audience sees only the music, and that is the aim of on-site support.