The Bengals wrap up their bye week on Monday, hitting NFL Films at the door of Paycor Stadium with the loudest knock of all.

The eyes and ears of the league have returned to a set they find as comfortable as summer stock to begin filming Hard knocks HBO documentary about the last six tough weeks of the AFC North winter.

“I run all the field operations, but I wanted to make my headquarters here,” said Steve Trout, the project’s senior director who cut his teeth in the 2009 series at Bengals training camp and still works with the stars of that show talks like Chad Johnson and Marvin Lewis.

“I have six directors, but I feel comfortable here. I know the stadium well, I know the facility well.”

Everyone will soon do the same. The first show will air a week beginning Tuesday, Dec. 3, just over 48 hours after the Bengals play the Steelers Sunday (1 p.m. – Cincinnati’s Local 12) at Paycor, part of NFL Films’ first effort to air all four films to capture. teams in a division during a season.

Any similarity to a training camp story is purely coincidental.

“The stakes,” Trout says of the biggest difference between the August show and this one. “I tell teams, ‘Look, on the third day you forget we’re here.’ They grin and then they do that. It makes them just trust us and look past us. We are not here to make something sensational, the big difference with August.”

So the show’s footprint in the building is smaller than training camp. Thanks to that and the way technology has shortened the period from 2009 to 2024, only one truck was needed to bring in the equipment. Trout’s army is lean and light, taking up half of Paycor’s TV production office.

He has two or three camera crews, manned by one or two people, selected from a group of ten. There are 16 robot cameras, smaller and quieter than 15 years ago. There are also approximately 50 microphones nestled in various offices and player areas.