By Steve Ritchie
Every Thanksgiving, NFL broadcasts spend a few moments showing the video crew and the technical wizards who are responsible not just for telecasting the game but for providing all the graphics, highlights, replays, closeups, and other elements viewers have come to expect.
Silverton’s Olaf Bahr made his living for 16 years in one of the mobile production trucks we see briefly on those Thanksgiving Day broadcasts. As the Replay and Real Time Editor on the production team, Bahr was the person responsible for making sure the replay of every key moment or play came on your television screen within seconds of when it actually happened. And, usually not just one replay, but several from different angles, so viewers could see “Did the ball come out before his knee hit the ground?” or “Did he get both feet in bounds after catching the pass?”
While Bahr never worked a Super Bowl or a Masters golf tournament, he did plenty of other major sports event, including Trailblazer games, NBA playoffs and finals, World Cup soccer, college and professional football, and Summer and Winter Olympic games.
Bahr got his start in the business as an undergraduate student in broadcast media at Oregon State in the late 80s and early 90s. His first gig was holding a salad bowl sized microphone on the sidelines at Beaver football games, picking up sounds from the field.
“It was very entry level,” Bahr said. “From there it was learning how to cable the place and set up all the equipment. It’s less glamorous than what people think, especially when you’re learning the basics, setting up, tearing down.”
Bahr said that after paying his dues on such mundane tasks, he figured out which discipline he wanted to pursue in broadcasting: camera operator, video shader (“makes all the cameras look the same”), graphics operator, scoreboard operator, technical director (“one of the higher end positions”), audio director, and so on.
He started out on a replay machine, which, in those days, was “kind of a giant VCR – industrial strength I would call it – and that was what you did your replays on. The problem was once you rewound the tape you stopped recording. But then we got hard drives and computers that were better and faster and we had a system that would record non-stop. Some producers didn’t understand this concept, but since the advent of DVRs and TIVOs people do get it.”
His office on the job was a 53-foot truck with an expandable side that was turned into a mobile production studio packed with millions of dollars of equipment.
“We were always there seven to eight hours before the game starts. You’re building all these stories that are going to go into the show,” Bahr said.
Once the game started, though, it was fast and furious to get replays up on screen quickly. Bahr would communicate with the producer via headset, who would then relay to the announcers what was coming.
“Everything is based on time code,” Bahr said. “(In football) I’m marking down when the ball was snapped, and when the touchdown was scored, for example, and then in the system I create a catalog of these events. I name them and then take those events – we call them a play list – a series of events that are stacked together and that’s how you’re getting a highlight package. This is ‘in game’ instant replay.”
Working freelance, Bahr made himself more marketable by becoming proficient on a variety of always-changing equipment and operating systems. He also worked many different sports rather than specializing in one or two.
The downside of the job, though was the constant travel.
“I was gone for over 200 days of the year. You give up family events, birthdays, special events, everything in exchange for a check.”
Bahr recalls one occasion when he received a phone call on a Tuesday asking if he could be in Nepal on Thursday. A crew was there to film a team climbing Mount Everest. He went, but never made it to the base camp due to the SARS outbreak.
“The catch was I could go in, but no guarantee I would get out for another two months, so I sat in a small hotel in Katmandu for 22 days reading the Bourne Identity novels and writing a manual on how to setup and run the equipment for the crew which was already at the base camp.”
Eventually, the pull of family and community caused Bahr to change jobs. He went into training and is currently product manager for Grass Valley, a firm headquartered in Hillsboro that designs and does training on replay equipment. While the position requires some travel, its nothing like what he used to do. And Bahr still does the occasional sports event. While being interviewed for this story, he got a call from Major League Soccer asking about his availability for an upcoming match.
Bahr’s wife, Donna, is a long-time teacher at Mark Twain School. He said she had to be a single mom to sons Aidan and Anson for years because he was gone so much of the time. Now that he is home more he revels in being able to participate in the family stuff that most take for granted.
“I really have a Monday through Friday job now even though it is not nine to five. I’ve seen more of Aidan’s high school soccer games in the last year than I did total in the 15 years he’s been alive. That speaks volumes. It’s worth the cut in pay, it’s worth having to drive to Hillsboro for work.”
“I was excited about covering (these) events. But for our family we are more interested in participating, not watching. I never watched sports when I came home. I had had enough of it.
“It’s a very different industry … What you give up is the connection between you and your town. The reason that I traveled was so my family didn’t have to. There’s nothing here in Silverton that you are going to cover with a network broadcast… But it’s the quality of life that you get here in Silverton that makes living here worth it. It’s all about quality of life.
Bahr said he asked his sons, “Are you happy here? Would you ever want to leave?” and the answer was a resounding “No.” They didn’t want to leave Silverton, and he has had no regrets in turning down more lucrative offers that would have required moving his family.
Bahr sees the field of sports broadcasting continuing to evolve to meet consumer demands. His company is working on what he calls “second screen opportunities” where people can see key moments of a game or event right after it happens on their own device – PC, tablet, phone or whatever. Opportunities abound in the field, Bahr says.
“We have to go find people to come into the business,” he said, noting that the broadcast media program at Oregon State that he graduated from no longer exists.
