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Comment by ta1243 | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice shot, but it's a basic skill to read your (prewritten) copy to a specific deadline. The last shot was 20 seconds, he had plenty of time to practice and speed/slow down as the clock went on. Sure it would be stressful, but had it failed then the program would still have gone out, just with a voice over and a different angle.

The credit goes to the production team (including Burke, but presumably also his producer and camera) for thinking up the shot in the first place. For delivery, there are far more stressful and impressive live timings done every day around the world

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If you search YouTube, you will find other presenters trying to mimic it and getting it hilariously wrong.

In radio, talking over the start of a song and ending right when the lyrics kick in is called "hitting the post" and sometimes it's done without prewritten copy, just winging it.

It's just a skill you can practice and some people get quite good at it.

One difference with this is if you miss the lyrics, you can just try again next time. There's a new song every few minutes.

There was only ever one launch of Voyager 2.

Sure, but if he missed it you'd have never known he'd have missed it.

Get the timing wrong on Eurovision, despite having one every year, and 100 million+ people will know it.

> There was only ever one launch of Voyager 2.

I get that it probably wasn't in the production schedule, but strictly speaking they could have come back a couple weeks later and done the shot with the voyager 1 launch.

At my college radio station, every applicable record had intro time cues written on a label on the record jacket. You would know that there was, say, seven seconds you could talk over before the song began in earnest. "Hitting the post" (not familiar with the term) was not really a problem for the deejays. p.s. - I loved being able to inject our call letters into the gap on 'Riders On the Storm', timed to the top or bottom of the hour.

I always think it's pretty impressive when there is a military fighter jet flyover at e.g. a sport event and they hit the timing within a few seconds to coincide with the last few bars of the national anthem. I don't know if they plan the exact flyover time in advance or if they are just circling a few miles away and coordinating by radio with someone in the venue.

I assure you it's quite precise and there are people working to time it down to the portion of a second, and they're all on radio.

Honestly these old shows had such a low budget I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was just Burke and the cameraman there. And in a way the stakes were low: if there was no executive producer shouting “GET THAT SHOT” at them they might have just been thinking “why not give it a try, if it doesn’t work out, oh well, we’ll just do a voiceover”.

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