So, let’s say the broadcast is in 7 second delay. They hear a dude say “Oh, Shit”.
Now that the “shit” has passed by, how do they hit the delay so that they only bleep out the word “shit”. They seem to be quite capable of doing this.
It seems to me that if I was on the delay button, I’d wait a few seconds, then hold down the “mute” for 5 seconds, giving myself a nice buffer on both sides of the “shit”. Do they do the same thing, but are just much more capable of nailing the exact half-second that the swear takes up?
I can’t imagine the delay guy has two audio streams in his ear, and he’s able to process and “match” each one so that he knows exactly what preceeded the “shit” and is able to mute it perfectly for the broadcast signal.
What am I missing here?
I noticed this (most recently) the other night during an Arena Football League game where they had the QBs and coaches miked for the whole game, and used that as audio instead of commentators.
Good question - because just listening to the live feed, then switching to the delayed one would only allow you to catch the first word - if the speaker follows with another censored word, say, four seconds after the first, how would that one be caught?
From the shows I’ve seen or heard that were 7 second delayed “live” that they needed to cut out something there usually is an actual 4-5 second chunk of video/audio missing. You’re watching it and suddenly it seems to skip forward.
When it’s just an actual “bleep” put over the unwanted word I think those segments are recorded much earlier and later edited.
I don’t have a factual answer to your question but
translators at places like the UN have a feed of a speech coming in one ear and are speaking the translated speech at the same time they are listening. If you can listen and talk at the same time, I can imagine it is possible to listen to two streams at the same time.
And they will mention something about waiting for the delay to build back up. How does that work? Are they slowing down the output on the air until it gets 7 seconds behind? If so, why isn’t it audible?
Actually, from listening to The Ticket (Dallas, 1310 AM, who’s hosts are pretty open about how things work) they do in fact build up a 7 second delay. Apparently all of their outgoing audio is run though a computer called an Enco which ever-so-slightly delays the sound or adds a little bit of extra silence where silence already exists, until it builds up 7 seconds of delay. If something is uttered on mic that shouldn’t be broadcast, they hit the “dump” button which cuts out that chunk. On the radio, all you hear is someone talking then more talking and someone saying “You can’t say that!” and some chuckling and someone else saying “yeah, I dumped that.” I don’t have any idea of the mechanics of how the producer or whoever listens to the feed and knows when to dump.
To digress from the original topic of the thread a bit, I heard an interesting bit on CBC radio about two months ago, where they interviewed a couple of simultaneous translators. Not only do they need to be able to speak two languages, they need to be able to think in them at the same time. Apparently, this is very hard (go figure). The useful time period for someone to do this is about 20 minutes.
I speak both French and English, and if I had to do both at the same time, I think I’d loose my mind. I mean, I can process one or the other, but not both, unless for the purpose of Franglish when speaking with another person, and that’s just mixed media.
That’s exactly it. There is a variable in the delay box that you can set so it can take up to 5 minutes to push the delay back to 7 seconds. Usually it’s not more than 45 seconds or so.
It adds small moments of silence between words and lengthens pauses. It is virtually transparent to the untrained ear.
The producer and the host are not listening to the off-air signal, they are listening to the studio mix. The delay box is feeding the transmitter. When an “oops” happens, the producer has 7 seconds to push the DUMP button. That’s time to hang up the offending line, getting the host and producer in sync, and then push the button. The moment the button is pushed, the host is live on the air and the delay starts building back up. Clear?
Much better than the old days. An endless loop cartridge was used, recording the audio and playing it back 7 seconds later. When an “oops” occurrred, the DUMP button caused a 7 second slice of dead air, and there was not much coordination between the producer and the host as to when the program resumed.
Now get offa my lawn. Damn kids and your digital delays.