Slow Computers

I love computers, but sometimes they are so slow. I'm sure everyone has experienced a slow computer at their work place or at home.

When I experience a slow down in a computer, it can show on the air!

Case in point--
We had a breaking news story concerning multiple shootings in Maryland. We sent a reporter out and had plans to go live at the top of our 11pm broadcast.

Seconds before we hit air, the live shot experiences digital breakup. The live shot kept going to black and back to video and finally black.

The decision was made to float (move) the live shot down in the rundown. No problems so far. We still did the story and ran the video from the story and then teased that we would have a live report in a couple of minutes.

We floated (moved) the live shot to the middle of the first block. Our intent was to re-run the video that we used at the top of the show. However, the computer was slow in adding this. When it finally came in, our reporter was wrapping up her story in the field and it was time for us to go to the next event...which we did.

Unfortunately, when we played the next event, we saw a freeze frame of the video on air. That was due to us trying to re-insert the previous video in from our live shot that we didn't get a chance to roll.

Since we didn't roll that video it was still cued up in the gate to go. Things happened so fast, we just didn't have time to go past it.

It all goes down to the fact that our reaction time was fast, but the computer just couldn't keep up!