CRAS AES President, Michael Fong, 2015-01-16-pg
The A1 for Fox's broadcast of the Diamondbacks game was Fred Domenigoni. He was mixing on a Calrec Artemis (Calrec consoles are sort of an industry standard right now for sports broadcasting). Chase Field was built in 1998 when Standard Definition video was the norm, but now that HD is the standard, the coax cable run throughout the stadium is no longer practical. Coax cable is capable of transmitting HD video, but only up to about 300 ft. The broadcast trucks are much further away than that, so some parts of the stadium were retrofitted with optical fiber. Optical fiber can pass HD for nearly a mile, but it's only been installed in certain locations. Just outside of the stadium, near the trucks, there is a building called the Blockhouse - this building functions as a giant patch bay. All of the cable running through the stadium is ultimately terminated in this building so it can be directed to the MLB, the broadcast trucks, the in-house production team, etc. The stadium's increasing age has also had a detrimental effect on its analog cable runs. In order to combat this issue, mic pre's for all of the microphones in the outfield are located just behind the center outfield wall. This way, the signal can make most of its run to the trucks at line level instead of mic level. There were seven DPA microphones embedded into the back wall of the outfield. These are primarily there just to capture the sound of an outfielder catching a ball. There was also a mic taped to each foul pole - these were there just in case a ball actually hit one of the foul poles. Mics were also placed in each dugout, each bullpen, and even by the pool. Shotgun mics were placed near each dugout pointed towards 1st and 3rd base. These are called "pick mics". The 1st base pick mic was the most used channel on the board. It by far required the most attention from the mixer. Behind home plate, there were 4 more mics. Two shotgun mics pointed at home place from the left and right sides. These are called "bat cracks". These mics caught the most action, but they were left up pretty much all of the time. The other two mics behind home plate were Shure UB88's. These were left and right crowd mics. These were always left up to make the viewer feel like they are always in the stadium.
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