Part of the reasoning behind the $1.6 billion investment in the NFL Giants' and Jets' MetLife Stadium was the potential for a New York-area Super Bowl. That's exactly what will take place on Feb. 2. Unfortunately, what may also take place, according to various almanacs, will be wind, rain, snow, and cold - any of which could make for a tough show to sit through live and an even more challenging one to put on.
Football games are no strangers to adverse weather, and open-air NFL stadiums have learned to deal with cold and frozen precipitation, but this will be the first Super Bowl played outdoors in a cold climate. This year, the NFL, which traditionally places a souvenir seat cushion on Super Bowl seats, is playing into the cold-weather theme: all fans at the game will find a Warm Welcome kit that includes lip balm, hand warmers, and earmuffs stuffed into a commemorative seat cushion. For the broadcast, though, the audio crew will have to rely on less glamorous tricks.
Gear behaves differently at extreme temperatures, and, in extreme cold, you're often reaching the operational thresholds of some equipment, observes Michael Davies, director of engineering for Fox Sports, which will broadcast Super Bowl XLVIII. You're actually getting below the spec sheet on some pieces of equipment. For instance, one of the first components of a microphone to fail in cold-weather conditions is its diaphragm: below a certain temperature, it loses elasticity, and the sound becomes progressively thinner, until it eventually simply stops moving.
He adds that the show's workflow has to account for many activities, from mic placements to cable runs, taking as much as twice as long to execute because of the cold and the sheer amount of extra clothing that crewmembers need to keep warm on the field. Hand warmers and other items will be distributed around the crew areas.
Davies notes that Super Bowl XLV, played in Cowboys Stadium in 2011, when a winter storm unexpectedly dropped snow and ice on the field ahead of the game, was a learning experience. Wind blew the show's stage down overnight and caused some equipment damage, and slips on the ice led to a few crew injuries. It caused some setbacks, but we learned a lot from that experience, he says, adding, The cold is one thing, but it tends to be the wind that really catches you.
Wind is a regular bane of broadcast audio, inducing low-end rumbling into open microphones and, if it's strong enough, sometimes knocking them out of position. Fred Aldous, Fox Sports audio consultant and senior mixer, says windshields, like Rycote Windjammers and Zeppelins, are mandatory on crowd microphones.
But what can be even more insidious than wind, he adds, is moisture on the ground, which can penetrate cables and connectors and short them out. You have to look at the entire signal chain. You can weatherproof a microphone, but a wet connector can still cause you to lose the mic.
Cables need to be kept off the ground not just to keep them away from moisture but also to prevent their being buried under even a small amount of snow - and chopped to ribbons by snowplows. We'll try to use hooks attached to the [stadium] sidewalls to keep wires off the ground in the event of moisture, he says. We're not sure yet if we'll be able to do that in New York so we'll likely also rope off the cable runs. We'll also use more fiber bundles, such as for SMPTE [data], to cut down on the sheer amount of cabling. And we'll bundle cables by type, so, if a problem develops, we can find it faster.
Super Bowl XLVIII will have complex connectivity needs. The show's pregame and halftime commentary will be done from a studio in Manhattan's Times Square, several miles across the Hudson River from the Rutherford, NJ, game site. There will be a lot of MADI and AES cabling for the comms, says Aldous. Much of the signal that goes between MetLife Stadium and Times Square will be carried on a fiber network set specifically for the show by telcom provider Level 3 Communications.
We've done lots of work in cold weather, so we know what it can do, says Davies. But the only thing you really know about weather is that it's unpredictable.
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Part of the reasoning behind the $1.6 billion investment in the NFL Giants' and Jets' MetLife Stadium was the potential for a New York-area Super Bowl. That's exactly what will take place on Feb. 2. Unfortunately, what may also take place, according to various almanacs, will be wind, rain, snow, and cold - any of which could make for a tough show to sit through live and an even more challenging one to put on.
