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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
Mike Sorrentino 0:00
On a second,
Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of The Production Geeks. Get ready, it's Production Geeks time. Let's dive in.
Michael Sorrentino 0:56
Thanks again for joining us on another episode, episode three of The Production Geek. Yes,
Dave Shaw 1:01
three, it's been a couple of weeks, it
Michael Sorrentino 1:02
has. So we're here on our lovely New York City, Midtown Manhattan rooftop, located just off Madison Avenue, where behind us you could see the beautiful Empire State Building, and all of the beauty that Midtown New York has to offer this time of year. How I mean, how awesome
Dave Shaw 1:19
is this? Yeah, you're looking right over to the buildings of Times Square, you get the Empire State Building, you can see over the East River.
Michael Sorrentino 1:24
It's thinking
Dave Shaw 1:24
about july 4 coming up, and if we're working on this project, we're gonna be talking about it a few minutes ago.
Michael Sorrentino 1:29
Yeah, it's gonna be perfect up here,
Dave Shaw 1:31
watching some fireworks and having a good time.
Michael Sorrentino 1:33
Nothing beats it. So, what do we have today? Today we're
Dave Shaw 1:36
doing some little margaritas with some patron.
Michael Sorrentino 1:39
Cheers, skinny margaritas.
Dave Shaw 1:41
Yeah, Mike's not drinking this month. Yeah, he's cheating on
Michael Sorrentino 1:44
us. Nothing sets the tone better. So today we want to take a dive into a couple of projects that we're working on, sort of pun intended, mid-flight. The first is coming up on the fourth of July. It's a massive, massive international celebration here in New York City for the 250th birthday of the country, and it will involve tall ships from all over the world, and we are being tasked with live streaming it for multiple days, and we're going to have a great setup in our studio with a field team, and then the next project we're going to talk about is pretty remarkable. Why don't you kind of give us the elevator pitch on that one?
Dave Shaw 2:32
So we're working with a company, we'll wait until after the event to name the company, but they're going to be doing the first passenger plane, fully electric passenger plane test flight up in Plattsburgh in a couple of weeks, and we were tasked with figuring out a way to live stream that, both with cameras on the plane and cameras on the ground, and a whole bunch of stuff, and it's been a fun project, and hoping that everything goes as planned, but we had, since the first flight, you never know what's going to happen when that thing takes off. I
Michael Sorrentino 3:02
mean, it's all engineering, everything in the subject matter is how have they engineered it and how do we engineer around it. So, we'll talk about that next. So, the first thing we want to talk about is our Fourth of July project. So, walk us through the what's the 10,000 foot view of our setup studio field, you know,
Dave Shaw 3:22
so as Mike mentioned, we live streaming the sail forth, which is all the tall ships coming into New York Harbor, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and everything. I think they're all coming from New Orleans right now, so it's a, it's a big trip, and ships
Michael Sorrentino 3:38
are coming from across, across the all across the
Dave Shaw 3:40
world, so this is actually through the company Sailforth, and the State Department wants to really showcase how the American people are interacting with the tall ships coming from these other countries. So, as part of that, they want to do some long live streams, let people that are watching it learn about the different ships, where they're from, why they're important, why we should care, get people's reactions going on to them, and really just kind of promoting that as a tourism and kind of a nice friendly place for people to come and people will be interested in what's going on. One
Michael Sorrentino 4:16
of the things that we wanted to use as inspiration for this project, when we were bidding on it, and pitching was the Artemis broadcasts, which were multi-day live streams around the Artemis flight around the moon in the earlier part of this year, and their setup was pretty straightforward to have sort of an anchor at a desk in that control room, and then they would go off into field reporters, bring expert guests on, and then they would roll in a lot of videotape packages, video pieces that were prerecorded, and so we're kind of using that as inspiration, and so we're going to have a studio set up with a. A remarkable host, who is a multi-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, who has done the
Dave Shaw 5:13
America's
Michael Sorrentino 5:13
Cup, America's Cup races for NBC, and among others, and plus is a remarkable seller himself, but so what are we, what are we looking at in the studio?
Dave Shaw 5:22
So we're making a nice investment to upgrade to a brand new LED wall, working with a company over in New Jersey to supply it. Somehow we're getting a nice 1.2 pitch, which is amazing, absolutely insane. Well, let's
Michael Sorrentino 5:35
talk about that. The pitch, pitch on these screens really matters on on video when you're in a studio, what's kind of the max pitch?
Dave Shaw 5:43
I mean, I would say one nine would probably be as high as you would want to go, and when we say these numbers, are we talking millimeters, and is that the distance between the pixels, basically the pixel, yeah, the pixel distance, the size of them, but the bigger it is, the more space you have between, so as you zoom in, you start to, you can get more issues, you'll start to actually see the LEDs rather than a nice flat image. So, the smaller you got, the finer the pitch, the smaller the pitch. The closer they are together, the less you're going to see them. Now, being in Midtown Manhattan, we don't have a giant studio, it's decent for the size for this area, but
if we want to be further away from the wall, we can only go so many feet and still have room to put a camera and all that, so the smaller pitch allows us to be closer to the wall rather than
Michael Sorrentino 6:31
so when we're setting these things up, what are the what are the key things we need to consider when we're looking for an LED wall? Is it, it's obviously the pitch, it's the quality, I mean, Dave, you've installed, you've overseen the installation of many LED walls, so a lot
Dave Shaw 6:45
of it is, I mean, you got to, you got to find out what the use is. If it's just going to be in a Times Square billboard, you don't need a small pitch, because nobody's gonna be that close to it, but for.. and you don't care about shooting out on a camera, you don't care about any of that, but the biggest thing is looking at the refresh rate, a slow refresh rate, you can start to get the scan lines through it. You got to make sure that it can do have a higher refresh rate than a standard one, the pixel picture, which we mentioned, but also the distance.
The further away you are, the less you're going to be able the subject is. It'll throw it slightly out of focus. Any of that stuff will go away
Michael Sorrentino 7:23
now. When you're installing something like this, one thing we're working now is twofold. One is how the hell do we mount this thing, it's heavy, and number two is how do we power it. So, tell me about both of those. So,
Dave Shaw 7:37
obviously, these things, I mean, they're LEDs. You don't think leds draw amount of power, but when you have 1000s of the little leds on panels, they, it adds up really quick. So, I mean, each panel at a full load takes over an amp, so you're looking at around 70 panels, 75 panels, you're looking at a high pull if you're running at 100% The nice thing is inside you're never going to run these walls at 100% you're going to be going to seven, 10% maybe, especially so you don't have to go crazy with lights to offset it, so there's no, so we don't need that much, but you never know when that PA is going to come in, you're going to tell them, "Oh, just bring up the wall a little and they're going to bring it to 100, and then you're popping all your circuits.
Michael Sorrentino 8:22
When we installed the two walls at Box Inks headquarters, it was two, what, 14 foot wide,
Dave Shaw 8:30
like 14 and a half by eight, give or take.
Michael Sorrentino 8:34
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 8:35
so pretty much a 16, close to a 1610 ratio on those, and they wanted it was a 1.9 and they speced out per five panels or six panels on the each row 120 amp circuit, so that was definitely way overkill, but I mean that was done and I mean you got to bring in the commercial electricians and I mean when you're looking at pricing you gotta factor in all those little things, because you're not gonna be able to run it off your standard power.
Michael Sorrentino 9:05
And then installation, now a lot of these kits, do they come with with supports, or is it generally you're buying the panels themselves, and then the supports and the processor are separate,
Dave Shaw 9:20
there's different, different companies. I mean, you get kind of the general ones that a lot of them are basically they have a US headquarters, but they're based out of China. They're your kind of low-tier packages. They sell a lot to churches and places that don't necessarily want to spend the higher numbers to get a will, we roll the dice a little bit, and also they have a lot less, they're not doing broadcast, they're not, and all that. A lot of times you can either negotiate with them or they'll toss in the support kit or the mounting rails if you're going to fly it, but you still need, if you're going to fly it, you still need to try. Saying you need somebody that knows how to rig it and hang it. The ground supports are great, but when you're in a little small studio like ours, now you're losing four feet because you got to have that back supported and weighted down, so it doesn't tip forward. So that's why we were looking to do kind of a semi permanent installation and do a couple of fake walls, and actually do a wall mount. Now, this, when you're looking into that, only certain ones can be wall mounted, because if it's front, it has to be front serviceable. So, there's a problem, it's mounted to a wall, you can't get into the back, so you got to find panels, and that are front that you can actually take the panels off in the front, service them, swap out a module. If you have a dead pixel, whatever it could be. If you're having a power issue, you can service it from there. You don't have to unscrew all these things to fix anything.
Michael Sorrentino 10:51
So, when we talk about the angle that we're going to install our walls, we decided to do a slightly larger than 90 degree angle, and what's the reasoning behind that?
Dave Shaw 11:07
So, I mean, a lot of the stuff now you can get the curve panels, which is you're gonna have a nice seamless kind of one again, it goes to the space right to in a nice smooth 90 degree curve, you need a couple of feet of that curve, those
Michael Sorrentino 11:18
are they come at a premium price right
Dave Shaw 11:21
goes by the vendor again, and the quality that you're going to get for good quality. Yes, very premium price. Now, one of the.. what we're doing is, we're going to.. if you do a 90 degree angle, they're going to come together like this. You're never going to get a clean seam between it. So, well, it's really.. it's.. I mean, it would be nice if you could, and just bottom right up against each other. You're always going to have that black line. It's there's going to be an edge, so by opening it up just slightly, you're able to cheat one of them behind. You might lose one or two lines, which nobody will ever see, but you can kind of slide that second wall just at that angle behind it.
Michael Sorrentino 12:00
Hi, Raul. Raul, you got to come over here and say hi. Come on over, just come on over here and wave, wave to the camera. So, Raul, we're talking about putting in that video wall. Yeah, so Raul's are super, yeah, is the super of the building. And, and Raul, when it, when somebody like us wants to mess with your space, is there. what do we need to consider insurance? Right.
Dave Shaw 12:22
Yes. So, so
Michael Sorrentino 12:24
Raul's here to make sure that we're enforced and we have a clear insurance policy. So, so all right, so the angle, the angle, the also the viewing angle of the pixels matters with the camera, or no, most of them have a very
Dave Shaw 12:44
wide view angle. You should be able to get at least 180 or 170 degrees, but if you have one camera way off, you may not get, you might be clipping something, so opening it up gives you a little bit more room to play,
Michael Sorrentino 12:58
when, when, when we, when we think about these, these screens, sometimes I think a lot of people say, well, how, how good are the, like, the scenes between the panels, like that, the individual, because you've got the panels, which are the actual consoles, right, which may have eight sort of LCD, depends on, yeah, they
Dave Shaw 13:20
have basically what they call modules inside. Most of them run six to 812 modules.
Michael Sorrentino 13:26
And do they always line up well? Or if they don't, can you fix them? Like, are they.. I mean, they can
Dave Shaw 13:30
be fixed. So, going back to a previous event we did for another client over at the New York Historical Museum, the scenic company mapped everything out. Everything was measured to the millimeter, it was going to look great. We saw all the plans, they came in, they spiked the floor, we installed the wall, and they come back to us, and they're like, it's not in the right place. So there's a stage box, and they measured that as the middle of the stage instead of actually measuring the middle of the stage, so we had to take the entire wall, at least the first, like, four layers of the wall, the top layers, to be able to slide it over exactly where it had to go. Now you got some of these production techs that just spent a couple hours putting a wall up, and now they get to take it down and put it back up again. They get a little frustrated, so you can definitely see when they're not aligned right. The modules are usually easier to fix within it. Otherwise, you got to unlock them and kind of just jiggle them into shape and do that, so that because they rushed it, it definitely did not look right. But we, so we had to spend a couple hours kind of fixing everything and aligning it. But when it looks aligned, I mean, you, it looks very seamless. You can't really tell. I mean, if it's all black, you're gonna see little seams and little edges, but once you throw some color on there, it looks really nice.
Michael Sorrentino 14:47
So, beyond this one production, now in this particular case, we'll be able to put a nice, beautiful wide shot of New York Harbor. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate on the fourth of July and following days, but you know. We, we can do virtual sets after that. I mean, there's virtual
Dave Shaw 15:03
sets. I mean, we're right on the roof. I'd love to get an IP-based camera that we can run right up here, and we could pump in a shot of this roof behind everybody with the Empire State Building. I mean, that would be.. we can put any, anything we want in there.
Michael Sorrentino 15:18
So, this is just one.. it's just one part of that big project, but really exciting, something we've been talking about for a long time, and things are coming together. Oh, and the other thing we have to think about is mounting it right, so we're putting up false walls, so which essentially we're using, you know, two three quarter inch plywood with with two by fours that are, you know, the highest construction grade, because it's a lot of weight, a lot of weight, bolted to the floor, secured to the wall and ceiling.
Dave Shaw 15:46
Yep,
Michael Sorrentino 15:46
all right. So that's that's exciting. That's what we also simultaneously we're working on this really amazing project.
Dave Shaw 15:53
Yeah, we mentioned it. We're gonna be live streaming the first fully electric passenger plane, 30 person passenger plane test flight, and it's
Michael Sorrentino 16:02
just the pilot that's going to be in there, just the
Dave Shaw 16:04
pilot. The was up there last week, we were testing all the data connections, programming the live view servers, they work on their network. So,
Michael Sorrentino 16:12
before we talk about the solution, what was the problem? They gave us a certain amount of weight and space, right?
Dave Shaw 16:16
So, yeah, so basically they said, can you stream this? We're like, yeah, I mean, we can stream
Michael Sorrentino 16:22
anything, because, yeah, we
Dave Shaw 16:23
can figure it out, but then they go, you only have x amount of weight, you can't run real, you can't really run cables, because then everything's had to be run in the wing and then pulled out, I mean, this is a fully engineered plane that it's literally mapped out to the kilogram or the whatever, however you want to whatever weight, and so we were trying to figure out different solutions, and we were going through all different things, like if we run this cable, use this camera into this unit, and just everything was adding too much weight, so we discussed using the Lu Smart app from Live U, which does unlike the actual field units, it does a live in store, so we're able to stream and also record into the phone, so it's going to be a short 1015 minute max record time. So luckily, once these things are mounted, we don't have to worry too much about battery, anything like that, but we can start them all up, make sure everything's streaming, and we have the two servers sitting in the fly pack that we built.
Michael Sorrentino 17:27
Yeah, so before we get to that part, so the live view - we've talked about this in previous episodes - Avi West makes our high vision now makes a similar product, where it takes the cellular and the Wi-Fi, combines it. So now we've got the cellular in the phone, but we're also installing Starlink on the plane. Yep,
Dave Shaw 17:44
so there's Starlink involved installed on the plane. So we're going to be testing the connection between the phones and the Starlink during a high-speed taxi test next week, making sure the phones still talk, but that's another thing with these, these planes, being on a plane, the way the Starlink works is it connects to different satellites as you're moving. Now you're now adding that speed of the plane, so what we actually have to do is put in the delay units, which we were talking into this, because so live view, you're able to delay the amount of time which will allow it to buffer, so if you have a little blip, it'll be fixed before that actually hits your system. But now we're putting in a three second, two or three second delay from where the live view comes from the plane till it hits our control control room. Now, how do you do everything with the local cameras that don't have that? So, yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 18:43
so we've got how many cameras on the plane
Dave Shaw 18:45
we're running? Six, five will be streamed. Okay, so those are
Michael Sorrentino 18:48
all iPhones with the LEU Smart app.
Dave Shaw 18:51
Yep.
Michael Sorrentino 18:51
And then we have, how many physical, like cameras, gonna be about operating seven
Dave Shaw 18:57
cameras only? I think three or four will be on the stream, and then we're gonna have a live view phone unit and flight control, just like the flight control room. And then we're gonna be bringing in, via Zoom, a watch party out in LA.
Michael Sorrentino 19:14
So, the so the cameras that are operated, that are connected, that are not phones, they're gonna use a live view pack, live view, no. So,
Dave Shaw 19:22
those are going to come directly into our system,
Michael Sorrentino 19:25
and so those are coming through an SDI feed,
Dave Shaw 19:27
SDI. So, we had to put in a, we put it in Everts delay system, because the
Michael Sorrentino 19:32
challenge is we're delaying some cameras, not everything's in sync, right? Yeah,
Dave Shaw 19:37
and there's no way to sync all that up, so we so we're put in a delay system, so we're able to delay all those incoming signals, and on the ground when we're doing our tests, we'll actually be able to make sure that everything is coming in in sync. Now we also had to do this with audio, so most of the cameras that are going to be coming in through SDI, they're either coming in through the GG. SDR wireless kits, or it's going to be coming from a drone. I can't feed camera, can't feed the audio through the camera, so we're actually doing a SDI embedder, bringing it in there, which goes into the delay unit. So we have our audio mixer, which will feed out into this embedder.
Michael Sorrentino 20:18
In this delay unit, you're able to program how long of a delay you want for each camera? Yeah, is there a maximum?
Dave Shaw 20:24
It depends on the frame rate that we're doing. We're running, I think, we're doing 10 ADP 2997 Should give us up to want to say about three and a half to four seconds. We're going to try and go at two, as long as it's stable for everything, which gives us that headroom on it, if we have to delay it more, and then the audio will go through the same process of doing that. Everything's coming into the ATEM constellation to switch, and then we're going to feed that into a VMix system, and we're going to be taking real-time flight data coming in. We work to do an API with the flight data team, and they're going to be pushing all that live data to us. We're going to pull it into Singular Live, which is an HTML graphics program, which basically will create a web page that we can overlay. So, we'll do that as kind of a downstream overlay, so people will be able to see the speed, the distance, time. How did you
Michael Sorrentino 21:22
connect the data to the singular live?
Dave Shaw 21:27
That's a good question. That was.. I gotta go back, and actually, I don't have the answer to that right now, but we basically.. it's a push and pull JSON file, so it's basically there's triggers that are just gonna, it's gonna, the singular live is looking to pull that data every whatever milliseconds or seconds or whatever we tell it to update, and that on the back end the flight data team is pushing that data every few seconds, so then it'll just marry itself together, we're using
Michael Sorrentino 21:59
like a Google sheet or something in the middle or no,
Dave Shaw 22:01
so it's literally going to be pulling from the flight data, like things that they're pulling that we can have
Michael Sorrentino 22:06
real time data displayed on the screen. Yeah, there'll be the real time, so VMix is just performing one small task, which is the overlay.
Dave Shaw 22:12
Yeah, the overlay, and then we will probably stream out of that into a live view solo, which will then hit the different locations that we have to go to, why
Michael Sorrentino 22:22
did we choose the solo over the 300 for this particular output?
Dave Shaw 22:27
Three hundreds are they're very, very good at getting signal from point A in the field back to a server. The actual RTMP streaming from those directly leaves a little bit to be desired, right now. The live, the solo unit, I mean, that's really what it's meant for.
Michael Sorrentino 22:47
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 22:48
we're also considering, we'll do this during the taxi test, once we get all, because we're in the middle of Plattsburgh, New York, in the middle of an airport, so we're gonna have Starlink data from the ground and all that, so once we have everything tested and we figure out latency and all that, or any potential issues, we may also run it through the Live View Studio, which is a cloud-based app, which basically the Solo will push to that, and then what we can do is pull in a backup iPhone with just a bump shot of the airport,
Michael Sorrentino 23:21
sort of like an oh shit
Dave Shaw 23:22
kind of, if anything goes wrong, we're still pushing something to the cloud, and the stream won't go down.
Michael Sorrentino 23:28
That's the thing, is like a stream blips for like a second, some some of these platforms freak out.
Dave Shaw 23:33
Yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 23:35
so we, so you want to just always have something, always have
Dave Shaw 23:38
something there where we know that streams coming from the cloud. If Starlink were to go down, if I mean we're gonna have generators, but we still don't have a transfer switch, still gonna be that blip in the middle before we have to plug something in, or if something reboots, or if something fails, I mean, it's so you have, you have
Michael Sorrentino 23:58
the high speed test coming up, yep, in the next, what are you, what are you most looking forward to testing at that high speed test?
Dave Shaw 24:08
I'm not to be kind of like pretentious, but like I'm very confident in the engineering setup of our entire fly pack and our workflow that we've tested, we've run through everything. I mean, we'll still do it again to make sure there's no other changes or tweaks that we have to make, but my main concern is just making sure that the data is getting to the cloud.
Michael Sorrentino 24:32
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 24:33
once it hits that cloud and we're connected, we know we're getting data into the live views, but when that plane's moving at two 300 miles an hour, or whatever, it's going to move at, and you're trying to pick up different satellites, and once it gets up, and the cellular service is not great where we are, anyway, in the middle of an airport, in the middle of upstate New York, so you can't rely on the cellular, and that Starlink needs to hit the satellite. So, when you get moving at that speed, I know they use it on planes and all that, but I don't know what units they use. They don't tell you that.
Michael Sorrentino 25:07
Speaking of Starlink, that was a whole nother thing we needed to work out was port forwarding from the Starlink through a router into the live view, because networking becomes a whole thing in addition to video engineering, right.
Dave Shaw 25:22
Yeah, so I mean it's not my favorite thing to do, networking at all, but it is part of the job now. I mean, everything's becoming IP based. I can hook up the cables and we get our little live view screensaver, as long as the software is up to date, and and we know we're getting signal from our system, everything into our system, but you go to go live, you see some color bars pop up on the live view, you know you're talking to the server, but you're not getting any video in the middle of it, so what actually happens is a lot of networks and a lot of provide like network providers, they block a lot of this incoming video in these ports for firewall restrictions and all that. So, we had to open up port forwarding, and as soon as your IP goes down, changes when we hook up an IP to our server here into our network, it has to be one system, we got to change it up there, so it was an adventure. It took a couple hours to get everything working, but that was kind of huge. The main point of the visit last week, Dave
Michael Sorrentino 26:28
was just like sitting, like trying to get out the door, so he could drive the stuff upstate. Well, I'm feeling raindrops, yeah. And so I suppose we should call it a wrap on another episode.
Dave Shaw 26:39
Think so, but I'm looking forward to our next one, when we can recap both these events, and
Michael Sorrentino 26:45
also upcoming, I want to talk about some of the software in the coding that you've been doing, because I think that's a really amazing thing that Dave's been building some amazing software solutions to solve some of our problems, so so much more. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to like and subscribe, and also follow us on whatever platform you have. If you're on Apple and Spotify now, we are one of the few early adopters of the video, so we've just been accepted, by the way. So you can enable video on the Apple Podcast or Spotify to watch this if you haven't already, so thanks for watching. This is the Production Geeks.