Celebrity Poker Showdown 2006 Season
PRG pulls all the parts together — without a hitch.
Challenge:
Maintain a seamless audio connection between two stages, 500 feet apart.
Solution:
Fans of Celebrity Poker Showdown, produced by Picture This Television for Bravo, enjoy the interplay of gamesmanship at the table, commentary from the Loser’s Lounge and ad libs by eliminated players walking between the two.
In seasons past, both sets were adjacent, so stage managers used one system of radio frequency mics and receivers to communicate with each other, the talent, the truck and the audience. But at Harrah’s New Orleans Casino, scene of the 2006 season, the table and lounge were 500 feet apart — out of sight of each other and out of reliable transmission range for radio mics in the electronically cluttered casino environment.
PRG’s sound designer Bill Daly and his live audio crew of Alan Henig, Brian Teed and Jason Eskew pulled the far-flung scene together with a creative audio balancing act.So that stage managers could communicate to and from either set, PRG set up redundant same-frequency systems for the headset transmitters. To solve the tricky problem of interference, they detuned the Loser’s Lounge transmitter antennas to run at a lower level, reaching only to the point where transmissions from the gaming area dropped off.
For seamless coverage of the celebrity walks, PRG set up redundant systems for each channel of celebrity mics, with receivers in each location picking up dialogue.
“Our alternative was to run hundreds of feet of antenna, boosters and repeaters — and we still could have had signal loss or other problems,�? explains Daly. “Instead, we came up with a precision solution that worked flawlessly.�?
