2009 JW convention

So this weekend I will be attending and helping out at this years JW annual convention. It is being held at the Long Beach Arena center. The blue painted round building in downtown Long Beach.

This is a pretty big arena, it seats about 10K people although i've seen it with 13K in the past. A few years ago "No Doubt" recorded a live performance here, and i attended a "Foo fighters" concert here, but usually this arena is used to house a local Long Beach ice hockey team, the "IceDogs", and during the summer months there is a series of religious conventions like the one i will be attending.

My job for 3 days is to mix and feed the video signal to the big screen on the top back wall behind the speakers and presenters. If you pay close attention to the big screen you can see me snapping this picture.

Even though using ProSumer cameras and DOF adapters mounted to remotely control pan and tilt heads was a very tempting idea, at the end it was decided that because the screen's resolution is so low and the added complexity of a rig like that would just go to waste, a hi end Dome security camera system that pans, tilts and and zooms all from a single joystick, was the way to go.




We are using a pretty simple analog mixer to mix the live feed into the big screen and the various monitors spread along all the different departments on the arena.


Here someone picked up my 5DMKII camera and took a picture of me without me knowing it, how dare they?

Because the convention is going to take 4 full days, we decided to stay locally and avoid the heavy traffic that makes southern california such a wonderful place. All in all even though this is will not be a very creative project it is very important to me as i will be aiding attendees to better focus their attention on the various speakers that will be making presentations.