You may have heard the old adage, “Never ask to see how sausage or politics are created.” Well, add “or live TV” to that, because at first glance it seems just as mixed up of a process!

A week before the first live TV broadcast, we’re going to try a little practice production: a set of live video interactions between each of two guest researchers and groups of students in the United States. It’ll be done on a Tuesday, at one in the afternoon, just like each of the Live from the Rainforest programs to follow in the next three weeks. Not only will this provide a long, free-form forum for guest and youngsters to talk and interact, but it will also force us to debug our equipment for real, and give us a dress rehearsal for taking cues remotely from the main LFRF production facility at Mississippi State University.

And a good thing we did! If we were just doing our shows in a single, studio location, all variables such as lighting, power, and cabling would be tightly controlled. Instead, we have a separate outdoor camera location for each of the two live guests per show, both of which transmit back video and audio to the ACTS earth station room. In this central control room, there are audio and video selectors which allow the field producer to choose which of the two cameras’ signals will be sent back to MSU when a particular live segment is called for.