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Welcome to the rack room. The Production Geeks is a deep-dive into the obsessive engineering, high-stakes problem solving, and "nerd-level" passion that fuels Sorrentino Media. Join founder Mike Sorrentino and Dave Shaw (VP, Content and Creative Engineering) as they pull back the curtain on the complex infrastructure behind the world’s most ambitious broadcasts.
From live-streaming test flights for aerospace innovators to architecting massive multi-stream control centers and building turnkey studios for global enterprise leaders, Mike and Dave explore the "how" and "why" behind the tech.
This isn’t just a talk show; it’s a technical post-mortem. We dive into the spec sheets, the signal flows, and the "engineer the hell out of it" philosophy that makes the impossible look easy. If you love the gear as much as the result, and believe that the best production is built on a foundation of relentless technical curiosity, you’ve found your people. Engineered in Midtown Manhattan at 37th & Madison.
SorrentinoMedia.com and MadisonAveLive.com
Michael Sorrentino 0:00
Hi everyone! Welcome to episode four of Production Geeks. Get ready; it's Production Geeks time. Let's dive in.
I want to welcome you to our studio right here in Midtown Manhattan, right off beautiful Madison Avenue and 37th Street, where we have what is behind us now? We
Dave Shaw 0:24
got a brand new LED wall, which Mike is very, very excited about. Almost a little too much, if you could hear from the intro.
Michael Sorrentino 0:29
I mean, it's the best. By the way, cheers! You have our CVS special today. Yep, CVS special, Stella. So hits the spot. So, all right. So since day one of coming into a studio, I always wanted to have an LED wall because when we first started doing production, it was green screen. It was a lot of everything was green screen, and while green screen still is great and has a lot of features, it's just there. There are certainly limitations. A, you have to light it really well, light it evenly. You have to spend a lot of time in post production to key it. If you want to do live chroma keying,
Dave Shaw 1:13
always problems.
Michael Sorrentino 1:13
Always a problem. I remember the early days we were using Wirecast to do the live keying, and there was always a very heavy outline. You get the
Dave Shaw 1:23
halo, and the person moves a six inches out of the set spot,
Michael Sorrentino 1:27
and and then not great. And then I remember when this was in our old studio after Wirecast, or to when I was still using Wirecast, I ended up getting an ATEM switcher just for the keying, because at that time we had a single camera in the small studio, and we were doing a 4k signal into the ATEM with a chroma key, and then we would punch in using Wirecast to make it simulate like it was a multiple cameras. Similar what we did out in LA, right? Yeah, yeah, with that studio. Yeah, that's right. It's the was a studio that we built in Los Angeles. We painted the wall green. It was a 10 by 10 foot space, and we used the PTZ camera. But you're limited; you can't make camera moves exactly. And the and the background is married to the if you're punching in on a 4k image, you can't create the you know the depth would change when you cut to a close-up camera. The distance would between the subject and the background would be different, but not when you're doing that method. Anyway, so an LED wall is is awesome. We finally were able to put this thing in, and you know what is an LED wall compared to television screen,
Dave Shaw 2:42
it's really just a big TV. That's all it is. But custom sizes, and we're all set up so we can literally put anything anywhere, layer things, audio, video, everything. I mean, we did the Sailforth event, which we'll probably we'll probably dive much deeper into in another episode. But right behind me here, we had the live guests from coming in from the Hudson and reporting, and the anchor was sitting right where Mike is sitting. They were able to have that conversation back and forth. We had a live feed coming in from different cameras and everything for what was it? Earthcam, I think we partnered with on that one. Yeah. So we had all the EarthCam images coming up with live things happening, and you could put like we didn't, we haven't really used it yet, but you could put data and information and specs or specifics of like a ship in that particular case, which was really cool. Yeah. So I mean, there's just a lot of options. Whether somebody's standing, sitting here, just having a conversation like we are, but just literally putting whatever background, putting them whatever set, it's just it's much nicer than having to build out a practical set for a lot of shoots that can be very, very much simplified. Now
Michael Sorrentino 3:59
I remember when I was in the old studio upstairs. We had a client that we were doing. It was a four day a week show, and it was on a green screen. But there was a lot of heavy graphics, a lot of heavy graphics, and the recording of the show was easy because it was a single speaker standing on the green screen. But then compositing and all that, I mean, it was just you'd have to have build the graphics, then you'd have to composite them, you have to move the key, and and then if you had to make a change, it was a pain. So now it's like it's you. All this stuff is happening in real time.
Dave Shaw 4:34
Yeah, I mean those graphics that you then had to key over, you could have them referenced directly on the screen. Or
Michael Sorrentino 4:39
what are the downsides to an LED wall.
Dave Shaw 4:42
One, if you heard me complaining about it before we actually started, the heat.
Michael Sorrentino 4:45
Yeah.
Dave Shaw 4:45
So right now we're getting we're only at about a 5% 6% brightness on this, and it's a relatively dark, and we can feel the heat on our backs coming from it. So that's obviously one of the downsides, and it's also extremely fragile. So. You hit this the wrong way, you're going to break a panel. Not cheap to get replaced or repaired.
Michael Sorrentino 5:04
First day, first day it happened.
Dave Shaw 5:07
Yeah, I mean it's running a studio. I mean we've had people break screens and accidentally knock lights over, right? Dave Carroll in the back, who's not really listening.
Michael Sorrentino 5:16
Dave, Dave Carroll, who is one of the best directors of photography I've ever worked with, and one hell of a guy has probably some ideas in terms of the LED wall and how it could be. Dave just shouting from the back of the room. What what are some things that are not ideal or that we really need to like look at. I mean, we were talking about it before. I asked Dave, like, do you see the seams? So this is made up of a bunch of smaller panels. Were you saying that you could either shout or come over on set, either one? But like, what's the what do we need to look at?
Speaker 1 5:56
I think it's yes, where the camera is, what lens you have, how much is in focus, you know. There's different demands for for this screen. How you want to use it? There's
Michael Sorrentino 6:09
we luckily here the distance that we're at. It's not that far. I'm only like a couple feet away, but we add an artificial dirt here. But you were saying that when when we're when we want the background to be in focus, like if we want to display graphics, then we have an issue where we need to start thinking about the pixels, right? Can you
Speaker 1 6:28
the the the way these candles are manufactured? You see, like the the the individual, this is the LED diode, yeah, right. So it can create patterns and things you have to be concerned,
Michael Sorrentino 6:43
like a moire type thing, or
Speaker 1 6:46
it does kind of yeah, it does kind of present in that in that type of way, where it would be similar to a type pattern that would be on someone's shirt.
Michael Sorrentino 6:54
What's your favorite thing about having an LED wall, if there is any? He hates it in there.
Speaker 1 6:59
I love it. I mean, I I want to get it. I want to get into doing more dynamic stuff with it. Yeah, you know, we're not exactly set up for full virtual production. Yeah, but like, why not do things where there's motion? You have, you know, put a like. I want to do something where you know we just put like you know a spin it up. Go ahead. Yeah. Where people walk in front of it, and you had like motion background.
Michael Sorrentino 7:27
Oh yeah, we could do the Unreal Engine, which is where, I mean, that's taking it to a whole nother level. But they have the the full virtual production where you have trackers on the cameras, and when camera moves, so does the image in the background and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 7:42
I think you know having dynamic lighting that we're adjusting that also corresponds to what's going on on the screen would be next, you know, a next
Michael Sorrentino 7:51
level yeah thing for us to work out. Yeah, dynamic lighting. That's an interesting. How how is it lighting with this? Because the way it's sort of matted, unlike a television screen, right? So, is it easy to light with around? Like, we don't really have reflection, right?
Speaker 1 8:09
No, there's you can start. I mean, this is an interesting background to talk about because it has a lot of black in it. Yeah. So that's where you do start seeing some elements, but you know, in the pangolin, but like with a brighter background, you know, you can start keying with it. Like right now, you're not keying with it. We're not using it as a source of light. But if you had like, let's say, like a, you know, an outdoor background where you have a lot of light coming, yeah, you know, we could play with that, use that light on you to then, and then adjust, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Like you feel more blended, something like a little bit more. This is something like that. And then if you start actually, you know, adjusting some lights here, yeah, room, then you start all up. All of a sudden, you know, that's more dynamic. There's, you know, and you turn the brightness up on the screen. All right, now you said it's at 3%
Michael Sorrentino 9:02
right? Yeah. So let me.
Speaker 1 9:05
Those would all be things to think about.
Michael Sorrentino 9:07
I'm going to turn up the brightness now, just to show everybody like what we're dealing with when we talk about. So this is is at 4.7% This is 28% This is 65%
Speaker 1 9:24
Now you got this great light.
Michael Sorrentino 9:26
Here's 100
Speaker 1 9:27
light space in his camera. Take it back down to 80%
Michael Sorrentino 9:33
Yeah. So now, now you know he's more, much more sculpted in his single. So you know you're seeing the lamp of the light coming off the off the screen is being filled on the on on his right side or left side. We can make it more dramatic by turning off the fill, and then he's really like one side his face is in shadow. And you know, it's just a way to marry the environments. This is that's really cool. I. And and while we're talking about like the brightness, before we put this in, it's a permanent installation. So yeah, we'll show some pictures. But there's a there's a a frame we had to build a wall, like a frame to to put it in, and then so that was like a floor to ceiling, like they need to be anchored, but then we had to put in electric, electric. Yeah, we had to
Dave Shaw 10:26
add in all the electric. These things pull a decent amount of power when they're very bright. I mean, something like this isn't a ton of power, but you're it's a lot of panels at a fine pitch. So
Michael Sorrentino 10:37
we had to have them install seven, right? Seven dedicated circuits. I
Dave Shaw 10:41
believe it's seven. Yeah, seven circuits. It's. I mean, we're going nowhere near that amount of power, but we want to have that overhead, so we're not knocking out breakers and everything during a show if we bring it up.
Michael Sorrentino 10:55
Right.
Dave Shaw 10:56
Yeah, and but you know the the I always thought LED was like low power usage. Why is it that this thing pulls so much? Well, I mean, yet so many little pixels. So an LED TV, you're running the even at 4k, you're running whatever the 4000 lines are. You're doing that, but think about these as 1.2 millimeter pixels here on this, and how many of them. I mean, if we actually did the math, the number of panels that you're actually lighting up, and they're extremely. And then you're also there's receiving cards, so you have to get something to process that data. So those all have to be powered. Everything passes through. So you have your in a chain. I believe we we have the seven different chains per circuit. So all the power and the data and everything has to go through all this. So you're powering. I believe we have seven panels on each circuit. So,
Michael Sorrentino 11:49
so walk me through what's happening on the other side of the screen. So you've got you've got these panels that actually can be removed with like a mag. This is
Dave Shaw 11:59
fully front serviceable, so we we have no rear service on it because everything's mounted into three quarter inch plywood.
Michael Sorrentino 12:05
Okay.
Dave Shaw 12:06
So yeah, you have a magnetic tool. If we ever have to reseat anything, if we have to change out a module or a panel or anything, it's all from the front. But behind it, literally everything is just daisy chained between power and Data,
Michael Sorrentino 12:21
and then inside these. So let's say like a panel is probably like two feet or something like that. I believe it's
Dave Shaw 12:28
two. I believe they're about two by two by one. And
Michael Sorrentino 12:31
then in there, this particular unit has two power supplies, right?
Dave Shaw 12:36
Two. It has redundant power, so that's another place where we're taking extra power. So if it were to go out or one of the boards were to break, it would default back to the other.
Michael Sorrentino 12:45
And it does it do any processing or anything inside the panel, or is it just a dummy like?
Dave Shaw 12:51
It's really on off the receiving card. So we have the actual wall processor, which is behind there, that takes our signal from the control room, wherever we're feeding it through through our routing system. Anything you want to put up here, we can route to it, and then that will basically turn it into the proper aspects to fit on the wall. Now it's not a true 16 nine wall, so we do have to manipulate and everything. So we're using Milloommen, where we can bring in a signal from an Apple TV. If somebody's doing something for live, we can build up whatever graphics we want, different layers, shows, and as simple as Mike just did here, swap whatever is going into that wall, and then scale it to the proper aspect, crop what we need to. If it's a PowerPoint, we can put it on a background to keep that same aspect. Really build whatever we need to to make it work and look good. And then the the processor itself is is that like is it anything
Michael Sorrentino 14:00
fancy? Is I mean is I mean, I mean,
Dave Shaw 14:01
it's a standard LED wall processor. Nothing crazy. It takes our SDI line in. I think we actually converted to HDMI because then we can do the 4K to get a bit higher
Michael Sorrentino 14:13
because this particular processor couldn't pull SDI a 4K and SD.
Dave Shaw 14:18
Correct. It was only an HD one,
Michael Sorrentino 14:20
but they do have processors.
Dave Shaw 14:22
You could, yeah, you could do that, but I mean, it's a little inverter box.
Speaker 1 14:25
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 14:26
doesn't make a difference. We're still feeding the 4k and then just converting. But what it does is it then we map within that processor how these are wired. So we have a data line that runs to the top corner. Maybe that comes down and then over two and back up. The next one then starts, so they're all daisy chained together. Everything is daisy chained, but since each you can only run a certain number of pixels per output on the processor, so which you can do more than one column or more than one row. So this is designed where kind. Goes down and then up a couple, then the next one might come loop around, so it's kind of divided up. I
Michael Sorrentino 15:06
remember when they were setting it up, they had a bunch of grids. I'll probably, I think I have a picture, so I'll put it up. But so they have to then map it, right?
Dave Shaw 15:14
Then it gets mapped within the processor, so you actually have the flow where my inputs here and it's going to go down over up, and then the next one might still go down over up. The next one might come down and around. So you're telling the process of where physically every where every panel is to create the this array.
Michael Sorrentino 15:34
It's really really cool. What are the what are the issues that we could have with these things. I mean, they the pixels are very fragile. They're very
Dave Shaw 15:45
yeah.
Michael Sorrentino 15:45
Let's talk about that. The pixel pitch. So somebody's looking at a wall. The
Dave Shaw 15:49
reason that we got this one, and I told Mike we weren't going to talk that it was used, but it was a pre previously owned, and it was an event company that had it. They bought it for a particular event, but the 1.2 is so small and so fragile that it didn't work for actually packing it up and having to reset it up at every event. So we were able to get a really nice deal on it because they just wanted to unload it. But that 1.2 is so fine that each that it's and it's also harder to repair.
Michael Sorrentino 16:17
And that's the distance between each pixel. Yeah.
Dave Shaw 16:19
So in the size of the pixels and everything. So I mean, this is so fine pitched where you can really have a nice clean text, and you could go between modules, everything, and should be really really nice.
Michael Sorrentino 16:31
Generally, like in a video studio, the probably the minimum you want is like a one nine, maybe a maybe a 2192,
Dave Shaw 16:40
It really depends on the distance. So
Michael Sorrentino 16:42
sorry, the maximum. The
Dave Shaw 16:43
maximum, yeah. But depends on the distance. You're in a giant studio, and you're going to be doing the weather map or whatever behind you. You can put the person 1015, feet in front of the wall. You're never. That's going to be so out of slightly out of focus until they take that image full, that it it's not going to matter.
Michael Sorrentino 17:02
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 17:02
you're never going to see that. But the closer the closer you want to be to the wall, the smaller the pitch, so you avoid seeing the actual pixels.
Michael Sorrentino 17:09
Yeah, and we're we're obviously pretty close to it now. Yeah, I mean we're probably two three feet. Yeah. Well, this is like an exciting addition to our studio. I think you know it's something we've already put it to a lot of use. Yeah, we've used it for a bunch of projects. So we've used it for Salesforce 250, which is great. As you mentioned, we put the live remote reporter up on the screens. We have a and then we had a beautiful view of the New York City Harbor. We've also used it for we had just today we had somebody in here from media training where they were using this to simulate a live presentation on a stage. So we were able to put their slides up here and they could pace back and forth as if they were on stage with the big slides behind them, which was nice. We obviously have
Dave Shaw 17:57
we had a film come in that used this for their background. They were doing an old school newsroom, so they came in and use this for the background. We have another something coming in that somebody just needs these virtual backgrounds for a project this weekend. So it
Michael Sorrentino 18:11
helps us offset it, like use for virtual sets. It really kind of gives us a lot more to work with, other than what's in the four walls. Now, I thinking back to the sale four 250. You'll see it now. Is the this is sort of like a hybrid where we have our backdrop, but we also had. I remember you know just in our setup days, Dave Carroll, who was here, was getting in here, and he's like, we need to add more to the set, and so they just started spending a lot of time doing like set decoration and stuff like that, and that really helps to you know take it. And then you also have these posts on the side that we did. What did we do for these these posts? So
Dave Shaw 18:49
it's actually just a eight foot here, or yeah, eight foot PVC
Michael Sorrentino 18:54
fence posts. Two of them. Two
Dave Shaw 18:56
of them. Yeah, butted up against each other, screwed together, and then we ran power into it to hang the lights, and that really just it gave it kind of that feel that to fit into the wall, fitting into a practical environment.
Michael Sorrentino 19:10
And we're gonna probably wrap them in black. We'll wrap them. Yeah, you could do anything. Yes, it's just you know, it's just like a nice little frame for it. You know,
Dave Shaw 19:20
and what's nice too is if we ever do need just a white seamless, easy enough to put it right in front. We did lose windows behind us, but I think this is a little bit. We can always recreate that. Yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 19:30
exactly. But anything here, you know. And I've even heard people not that we would do it, but you could put all green in there. And if you really wanted to do green screen, it would be evenly lit, you know. I wouldn't
Dave Shaw 19:43
do it, but no, yeah, you could, but um, but
Michael Sorrentino 19:47
you could also do. Remember Chromat? Yep, Chromat was uh, I mean, I remember we got it for that for that project we worked on together many years. Yeah,
Dave Shaw 19:56
wasn't wasn't ideal. It was, but it was basically a big gray.
Michael Sorrentino 20:00
Fabric background, backdrop with little like particles, millions right of little crystal beads that would only reflect the light back in the same exact direction it came from, and you would put a a light, a ring light on the front of the lens of the camera, and like would shine green in, and then that background only to the camera would look flat green. Was a good idea. It was gimmicky, though. It it didn't didn't work as well as they sold it. But here we are. So now, give us a call if you have any questions about LED walls. We'd love to talk to you and learn more about what you're doing out there. Dave always, you know, you say if somebody's got a problem or yeah,
Dave Shaw 20:43
you want to talk anything through anything, just give us a call, nerd out, come have a beer, and we'll help you figure something
Michael Sorrentino 20:50
out. Join remotely; you don't need to be here in New York. And you know, thanks for for tuning in. But we're going to talk about some other things next few episodes, some some crazy projects.
Dave Shaw 21:02
It's been a very busy summer, which is why we haven't done an episode in a few weeks. But have a few coming out in the next couple of weeks. So,
Michael Sorrentino 21:09
well, thanks everyone for watching. Remember to like and subscribe on either YouTube or on any of the podcast platforms. We're here, sorrentinomedia.com. If you have any questions, you need production, you need you know support, you need consulting. We love this stuff. We love to do it. We love to talk about it, and we'll see you next time on the Production Geeks. Bye, everybody.