We ran a clip desk on the LAN floor at Hexa’s summer event
Three days, 212 clips, and an average of twenty-six minutes from the play happening to the post going up. The venue uplink nearly ended all of it on day one.
SAMPLEHexa Peripherals ran a three day LAN in June and put KEYSMASH and SALTFROG on the main floor with everybody else. No stage, no green room, the same chairs as the two hundred people who bought tickets. We brought four editors and set up two tables behind them.
Why being in the room matters
A good play on a LAN floor has about an hour of life before somebody else’s phone footage of it becomes the version people saw. Cutting on site is not about speed for its own sake. It is about being the first version with the right audio and the right name attached.
- 212 clips across three days
- 26 minutes average from the play to the post
- 9 minutes on the fastest one, an ace in the day two bracket
- 4 editors on site, two more picking up long-form back at the studio
Day one nearly killed it
The venue uplink was 4 Mbps shared across the hall. Our first three uploads took eleven minutes each and then failed. By noon we had rebuilt the entire process around a local drive, cutting off a portable NAS and posting from two phone hotspots pointed at a window.
“We spent more time on the upload than the edit for about four hours. Then somebody found a spot on the mezzanine with two bars of signal and that became the newsroom for the rest of the weekend.”
Kai Mercer, KEYSMASH
He is being generous about the arrangement. It was his hotspot.
What we take to the next one
Our own connection, booked ahead, in writing. A second monitor feed, because one editor watching two players means the second player gets clipped late every single time. And a rule we made on day two and kept: nothing posts before the player has seen it. Twice that stopped us from putting up a clip where the callout audio would have embarrassed a teammate who was not in on the joke.
Kai finished fourth. Tomas went out in the round of sixteen and spent the rest of the weekend sitting at the desk with us, which is why five of the best clips of the event have his voice on them.
