Nice Shot NBC Brooklyn Studios
Nice Shot NBC Brooklyn Studios
Jodie Peeler sent me this recently and as I studied the photo of my favorite cameras in action, I began to try to fix the location. The donut box on the crane mounted TK41 told me this was New York…they were the only NBC crews to do this. CBS New York did this too with their TK30s. Must be something in the water?
The dead giveaway was the cabling on the sound boom. Notice it goes up. NBC Brooklyn was the only place that had overhead cable guides for the booms. As I understand it, there were big free swinging arms mounted under the lights that were rigged to keep the audio cables off the floor.
The beauty of these two huge studios was their size. Cameras were able to move in here like on movie sets and producers and crews took full advantage of it with lots of sweeping shots. There were at least two Houston Fearless 30B cranes (shown here), several Panoram dollies (lower camera) and lots of ped cameras.
The camera cables were too heavy to use the overhead system, but in order to get as much cable off the floor as possible, the audio was flown. Just off the top of my head, I think Studio A was 12,000 square feet and B was 10,000. Any guesses on what show or special this if from? Enjoy and share!
The cameraman on the crane looks like Bill Flood who hired me in 1967
My old friend, Rich Bernal, worked at a college station with the camera cables fed from the roof of the studio and sets around the perimeter. Every vew weeks they had to shut down the cameras and unbraid the cables.
The wireless cameras at CBS Television City blow my mind – and that’s hard to do.
Studio A was 11,200 sq. Ft. Studio B was 9,700 sq. Ft.
The cardboard box viewfinder might have something to do with the ceiling height and studio size. It would make it more likely that a bank of lights was in a position to reflect off the screen.