No. of Recommendations: 5
She saw it was wrong and immediately called him out -- he easily could have said right there and then: "Sorry, that was the wrong clip. Let's run the right clip." -- and made him look like a fool and Trump tool because, well, he's a fool and a Trump tool.
Just a bit of “behind the curtain” if I may.
In order to have “the right clip” you have to have preloaded it into the clip insertion machine, which I will call the video switcher (even though that’s technically a different thing.) When I was in the business you had a screen of about 25 options, and there was a second screen with another 25, and a third, etc. going as deep as you wanted (depending on how much memory your network had paid for.)
But the thing is, you have to know where they are and they have to be fed into the switcher ahead of time. You don’t just have an infinite ability to whisk “a clip” out of thin air.
So either this was really a mistake, or the engineer pushed the wrong icon on the screen (unlikely, below), or it was intentional and oops, they got caught. The reason it probably wasn’t “the wrong icon” is that for a show like this, and a prepared host, the clips would already be “stacked” in logical order according to a pre-prepared plan. Yes, sometimes a wild host and a great engineer can do things on the fly, but typically everything on television is more-or-less scripted, or at least anticipated.
Now I left the business just as the touch-screen video insertion tool was becoming popular; prior to that you had a bunch of cassettes stacked up, cued to the spot where you wanted to start, and a monkey in a room out of sight would slam one in to one of his three machines and push “play” when called for. When it was used he would turn it upside down (highly technical move, eh?) so he wouldn’t accidentally put the wrong one in the next machine. By the end of the broadcast he’d have 20 or 30 upside down cassettes teetering next to him on the floor, and sweat dripping from his brow.
The “touch screen insertion” tool came first to radio, and hosts like Howard Stern and others (us! All News) used them to sequence in sound-bites, commercials, sounders (“You Give Us 22 Minutes…”) and so on. Television quickly caught on, the only thing that slowed it down was the prodigious memory required for video compared to audio.
Anyway, it’s *possible* he could have said “Oh, let’s play the right one” but then “the right one” might not even have been in the machine, or the tech or director would have had to know which one and where it is, or whatever. It does happen, and that’s the mark of a great director and preparation (*and yes, Fox has both) but there’s a bit more to it, and I thought you might find it interesting.
Or not.
