Technicians operate equipment designed to produce special effects, such as the illusions of a bolt of lightning or a police siren. Field technicians set up and operate broadcasting portable field transmission equipment outside the studio. Television news coverage requires so much electronic equipment, and the technology is changing so fast, that many stations assign technicians exclusively to news. Chief engineers, transmission engineers, and broadcast field supervisors supervise the technicians who operate and maintain broadcasting equipment. Technicians in the motion picture industry are called sound mixers or rerecording mixers.
Mixers produce the sound track of a movie by a process called dubbing.
They sit at sound consoles facing the screen and fade in and fade out each sound and regulate its volume. Each technician is responsible for certain sounds. Technicians follow a script that tells at precisely what moment, as the film runs through the projector, each of the sounds must be faded in and out. All the sounds for each shot are thus blended on a master sound track. Broadcast technicians in small stations perform a variety of duties.