NORTH ATLANTIC

3:00 a.m. — The decision is made to move the show out of the control room and into the editing system so that the production crew can get a few hours' sleep. Jim has decided to try one more tethered dive on Sunday, and the production people will be needed to communicate with him and show him video of the fiber spool.

I stay up with the editors while they start loading the video into their system and begin to edit the final show.

6:00 a.m. — I grab about a half-hour of sleep on the floor of our studio; editing continues ...

7:00 a.m. — The crew starts to trickle back into production and the boat crews prepare for a sub launch. Our deadline to feed the show back to land is less than eight hours away.

Noon — The subs have launched and the control room is tied up sending video back to the sub. We still need a great number of elements to be shot and edited into the show. The engineers work frantically to split out the equipment so that half can go to the subs and half to production.

4:25 p.m. — Despite our best efforts, the edited version of our show is not quite ready and our deadline is five minutes away. Jim's dive has been such a success that we have been unable to break away the key production resources to get the final needed elements.

What unfolds is one of the most amazing events that I have witnessed in 25 years of doing live television. Jim is still on the Titanic and the fiber-optic tether is working, so the team pulls together and decides that we can feed a show out live (to tape). Over the course of the next four-and-a-half hours, we feed out a beautiful two-hour program. We take long breaks between segments to figure out what content is coming up next or to allow Jim to move to another location on the wreck.

7:30 p.m. — The feed is complete and we relax. After having dinner, the entire team heads back down to our studio to see our show on the air (we have a return feed coming in from the satellite). Even some Russian crew members join us for the screening.

12:30 a.m. — A number of crew members, our host John Burke and two of the scientists help out with a Webcast on Discovery.com. It goes very well and I head up to sleep. Others stay up to party.

Bob Sitrick is vice president of live production for Discovery.

More Leg 2 Expedition Logs: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 |

Also read the entries from Leg 1 of the expedition. |