From: TheLantern.com via TradingMarkets.com –
Ohio State U., Columbus, OH, Jun 04, 2009 (The Lantern/UWire via COMTEX) — VS | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating — When heading to an athletic event on campus, it can be difficult to imagine all the fine-tuning that goes on behind game day. Brutus, cheerleaders, players and coaches all work hard to prepare for game days. But there is more to the Ohio State Department of Athletics than most people notice. Besides the players and coaches, there is a group of dedicated, hard-working video technicians. They spend a lot of time to make sure that visuals are entertaining for players, coaches and, most importantly, the fans.
Even though they are behind the scenes at the athletics events, without them it would be hard to capture every moment. Video Services is responsible for operating the video boards, replay cameras and a list of other video-related game elements.

Staff

There is a staff of five full-time workers and two interns, said Mark Smith, the director of Video Services.

Along with the full-time staff there are student workers. Often there about 12 to 15 students helping to operate the cameras and video boards during the games, Smith said.

“We use two students for a typical sporting event; at the Schottenstein Center we use about seven people, and at the stadium it is about 12 to 14 people,” Smith said.

The student workers usually work during the evenings and the full-time staff work throughout the day and evening, depending on their schedules, he said.

Smith said he hires student workers to allow them to “gain hands-on experience they can’t get in the classroom.”

“One of our main goals is to teach the students, we put them into it,” Smith said. “The video boards and cameras are student-run, but we supervise them.”

Day-to-day

The biggest responsibility of Video Services is to film games and to produce highlights and banquet videos for varsity sports, Smith said.

“We work with 20 to 25 of the varsity sports,” Smith said.

Throughout the year, Video Services work closely with coaches, filming games, editing film for highlight tapes and producing banquet videos for each of the sports.

When not filming or editing, the Video Services staff spend most of the time preparing for games.

This ranges from organizing video archives to producing highlight clips for ohiostatebuckeyes.com, said Craig Velliquette, a full-time intern for Video Services.

Throughout the off-season, the staff prepares for the upcoming season, Smith said.

Video board season

Video board season is the busiest time of the year for Video Services. During this time of the year, Video Services is responsible for operating video boards for varsity sports.

“We call it video board season because it requires a lot of bodies to operate the video boards,” Smith said. “We have three video boards. We have one at the stadium, one here at the Schott and one at swimming and diving.”

Some of the sports that use video boards are football, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s ice hockey and swimming and diving, he said.

The daily schedule during this time of year can become quite hectic.

“We get here at least four hours before the game to set up and make sure everything is running and everyone knows what they are doing,” Velliquette said. “About an hour before the game we are live.”

During game time, the staff is in charge of damage control, Velliquette said.

“If a camera goes down, we have to troubleshoot it and make sure cameras are where they need to be for different promotions during the game,” he said.

On a typical day during video board season, the staff works 12 to 14 hours a day, Smith said.

Among all of the varsity sports Video Services supports, football requires the most.

“Football is its own animal,” Smith said. “It requires a lot more because there are nine coaches, plus a head coach, 100 players and 105,000 fans in the football stadium. The coaches really use a lot of the video resources to stay competitive against other teams.”

Velliquette said that although working in Video Services can be time-consuming and is often stressful, he enjoys doing it because he is always learning something new.

“You aren’t really stuck into a cubicle working a nine to five,” he said.

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