Today we talk with Rob Toscano, EVS operator with more than 30 years of experience. Rob is based in New York and he has been living there for most of his life. With such an experience as ABC NEWS, FOX SPORTS, ESPN, NBC UNIVERSAL and CNN he has many stories to tell....
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(Piotr)
Rob, firstly and foremostly, thank you for your time as it is obvious, that EVS operators do not have it much. Can you tell us what are the everyday routines in ABC News and Good Morning America TV show?
( Rob )
News is just the beginning of the day, its a good job for people that want to get home for their children who get off the school bus at 2:30 in the afternoon. You are generally home by then. You can also back-end sports shows which generally go on the air at 8pm but your shift begins at 2pm. The reason we begin so early in our day, so we can have a life with our children or work double shifts. What I do in News, begin like this, I organize my shows into 100 items for a 3 hour broadcast. The airing of the show begins at 7am and ends at 11am. We pre-tape the 3rd hour at 9am to 11am and it airs as tape at 1pm. In the EVS world, you have 2 functions known as ingest and playout or record and playback. Elements created for playback are dropped on a receive page and copies or moved to a work or playout page. The elements are layed out by segment play order, in the first two hours there are 16 segments containing at 70 of the 100 elements I playout. The remaining 30 may arrive during the show and are used for the 3rd hour. I record bumpers and product teases, before the show begins and I record weather maps. Those are played back by me to what is known as a local commercial break by an O and O. Owned and Operated. I listen to roll cues given to me by a Director, on some sports shows I have an assistant director aiding me with playout. In news we use an electronic rundown called Inews, it is owned by AVID technology. Some EVS is using RDP which is called rundown dependent playout, it is a combination of Be play by EVS, RDP which is EVS IP Director, and INews.
I not only work at Disney ABC network for morning News, also at NBC the peacock, Weekend Today Show which is morning news and the Today Show on NBC morning news. I work on MLS soccer for Apple TV 45 doubles a year at Soccer. Then I'm also at the Barclay Center working NBA and WNBA, both Basketball and Soccer I build packages and clip sound bites using the PL function of the EVS LSM. We have standardized the sound bites to be one second mos at the head and two seconds of mos at the tail. Most EVS ops learn to add Broll to an existing sound bite, this is an acquired skill using Aux audio the Playlist screen and a little bit of math. Yes this job required math, even if it is sometimes just counting backwards from 10.
(Piotr)
Can you tell us when and why you have decided to be an EVS operator and what is your story behind that move. Additionally, what does it mean to be an EVS operator and what are the job requirements.
( Rob )
I didn't start my career working on an EVS Device. I started working on a Steenbeck and a Moviola editing machines. Using a trim bin, a loupe, with synchronizers on a reminder table. Cutting negative to match encoding on film stock. My first job was working remotely in NYC for the automobile industry and locally for the fashion industry. My clients were Chevrolet and Cover Girl. The machine Moviola is built in Hollywood California, whereas the flatbed editor Steenbeck is built in The Netherlands. EVS on the other hand is built in Liege, Belgium. From film I learned editing on an Avid made in Massachusetts. The importance of Non Linear editing would become the standard in television editing. Learning the L Cut and adding effects from the Adobe product After Effects combined with Avid would propel an editors career. The EVS would evolve from a few pages of storage to many and the LSM tool would morph into the B play, the M play, the shuttle pro, the IP Director and relearning the L cut in IP edit, one of the modules of the IP Director. Learning to do live fixes on a timeline in IP edit would propel an editors career. Learning to configure systems would help a freelancer advance into an engineer position on the EVS. The separate module of the XFile has gone through several evolutions. Learning to stream record to NAS network drives, external storage was also a valuable skill needed at any EVS job site. If the Xfile couldn't convert a specific codec, depending on its version release, you would need a separate app to do the conversion for you into an mxf file, which is the native codec wrapper for EVS. A needed skill would be Adobe media encoder, or Sorenson Encode an Avid utility. Xfile 3 has been the last iteration of a codec conversion utility. I haven't mentioned the EVS VIA, because I have no experience with it.
(Piotr)
Can you tell us an inside story, something that happened in ABC during the show that everybody remembers?
( Rob )
The most interesting job I have worked on was a special concert Bad Bunny produced, I was hooked into the inside of a 16 wheel flatbed while it travelled over the George Washington bridge and I was cutting segments while we travelled, the power came from a gas powered generator, when the gas bounced, the power went out and we were down for about 11 minutes, I continue cutting for another 45 minutes, then aires out the elements for the next 2 hours, all communication was on the WhatsApp. A control room on the move through Brooklyn while Bad Bunny was on the roof performing for special dedicated to the nurse at Harlem Hospitals fighting Covid.
( Piotr )
Thank you for your time Rob and see you soon.
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( Rob works every day for ABC News Good Morning America audition, 1500 Broadway, New York )
( Piotr is a Uniwerystet-Telewizji founder )
