The night starts cold and in the rain. Atlético de Madrid faces Athletic Club in Bilbao on one more day of the Spanish Soccer League. Hundreds of thousands of people, refugees of the bad weather, see the images of the game in a house or in a bar. A Griezmann dribble in slow chamber, a close up From the energetic gesture of the “Ufff!” of the stadium after a Williams stick. These images in high definition and with an enveloping sound leave a truck parked a few meters from the field and surrounded by cables such as tentacles. Within the vehicle, so common in the football fields that ends up going unnoticed, the work of more than thirty people makes sense. It is a television study with wheels full of toe technology: a mobile unit. , after more than seven decades of its first use. “The vehicle that, provided with the necessary equipment, is used to provide specialized services,” and that, in football, allows bar fans to shout the goal of their team practically at the same moment as those in the stands.
“It is the link between the information and the sofa,” summarizes Jaime Baña, attached to the Eumovil Production Directorate to describe it. The company for which it works, part of the, is responsible for building, adapting and integrating technology into its own units. The one that operates in the cold night at the Metropolitan Stadium in Madrid, is one of the 105-23 in Spain – that have distributed throughout the planet, one of the three most important fleets in the world. “We cover four continents in countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Angola and practically all of Europe,” says Baña, who already works in a new unit. “We have always forced ourselves to be with the latest technology because the customer can ask us for any editing system and any quality and we have to be able to offer it,” he ends. To the newest units of your fleet, hybrids and with, 40 4K cameras can be connected. “40 is the maximum, but in reality they are usually used, they adapt very easily to the needs of the coverage,” says Baña. For the Atleti game, one of those that the League catalogs like Class B – less than those of Barça or Madrid – work with 24 cameras distributed by the field: 5 of them superslow For repetitions, a steadyycam At the field and an air that hangs from the top of the stadium.
The images they collect are gathered on a huge screen from where Daniel Lozano, director of realization, analyzes and in seconds decides which one broadcast. With a stuck beret and helmets with which he communicates with the team, he seems to know before anyone else the journey of the play. “I’m going to camera two, camera two. I go to camera seven, seven, ”he says tirelessly to his mixer who, immutable, clicks the images that the director is asking for. “Doing this seems very easy, but you have to have a lot of experience to achieve it. To understand what is happening there and so much speed, that is acquired, it is not studied, of course, ”says Lozano. He has been directing soccer matches since 2002 and in the serenity and speed of the decisions he makes, it shows. “Possible hand!”, He is the first to warn, while his eyes seem uncontrollable from one side to the other on the screen, warning the “positions of replay“That, seconds later, they will have the image of the repeated play with a couple of different angles and some in slow motion.
A few meters from those positions are the image control. “Here I know remotean The cameras, the diaphragm level of color is controlled, and get all more or less equal, that they all have the luminosity they have to have, that everyone has the detail they have to have ”, manages to explain baths before a subtle reprimand of the director to lower the volume of the voice. On rainy days, such as now, it continues to bathe with a much lower volume, “cameras control is complicated because there are usually many bass problems. The optics are tarnished and the image is washed. ” He people mott of the night, a “that steady You have to clean it, I can’t prick it like this ”, from the director, check the words before.
So that the problems that the rain generates do not go from cleaning the lens of a camera, the units have an advanced protection system, in addition to an air conditioning to maintain electronics in optimal conditions. “We have to adapt to the fact that we can work in very cold or rain conditions, such as these, or conditions of great heat. That the same can go to the Atacama desert, ”says Baña. And, although perhaps the football matches are the most common and striking coverage, they are not the only ones that the Mediapro units carry out. Studies with wheels cover Pan American Games, Latin Grammy, some NATO Summit or, in addition to many small weekly informative coverage. And they deliver a “key” product, that is, ready to broadcast, to the television stations that hire them.
To convey the signal they collect, Mediapro puts the hand of another of the group’s plots: Overon. Pedro Llamas, CEO of the company, explains his work: “What we do is receive the signal with some antennas and send it by satellite, it is received here and we broadcast it to television. We have an international fiber network that goes from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires through Miami, Madrid, Barcelona or Paris, practically all European countries. Then we can send any television signal in seconds from any point of the network to another. ” In football, the transmission has a particular process: “We have a network in all Spanish stadiums of First and Second Division. The people of Eumovil go there with their trucks, make the realization, we pick it up and send it to Barcelona, which is still doing some more treatment with the football signal of graphism, we collect it in Barcelona and we already distribute it worldwide and national. ” A journey that does not take a couple of seconds. “Everything has to be with the minimum latency, in thousandths of a second because, especially in Spain, when someone sings a goal in a bar, the one who is at home should not be waiting without knowing what happens,” explains Llamas.
A magical hand
That goal that fans sing in the bars or in the houses, reaches their ears with an enveloping sound. The play that runs in the field can be heard in detail. The hit of the ball, the shouts of the players, the conversations between rivals. To achieve this, the field is surrounded by microphones that send its sound to an isolated cabin inside the unit. But not everyone is always receiving the sound, rather they go up and lower their volume depending on where the play is. If a corner is played, microphones are activated from one side of the field and the others go out. If they clear the ball, the micros follow it in their journey. “To achieve this, you always have to climb the fast volume and then lower slowly, while you quickly climb the new microphone. You have to make soft transitions, ”explains Juan Carlos Fernández, unity sound technician. Only while doing so, the controllers of the huge sound console behind him move alone. A ghost hand exemplifies, while the play in the field takes place, what the technician explains. “What happens is that this now has a system of tracking that allows the table to operate alone, ”he says. The magical hand is nothing more than a system that has the ball and that “makes every time it approaches the micros, because it activates them.”
Fernández, tells taking advantage of the free time that technology allows him, has been doing this work since the 1990s. And that technology that could threaten his work, far from worrying, seems to like. “Technology helps us a lot because we can be having coffee,” he says laughing, “but hey, he does because we tell him how to do it. In addition, “he ends,” you can always fail and for that we are here. “
At the end of the game, people will discuss the controversial plays, relive the goal with four different angles and comment on the reaction of the protagonists of the game. Nobody will talk about the house of the cameras that was never seen, of the failure in the microphones that was not noticed, or the repetition that never arrived. They will have lived that usual transmission on televisions on weekends with the objective of the mobile unit again fulfilled: that their work goes unnoticed.
