FEATURE OUTSIDE BROADCASTING OB DOWN TOA TEE
It’s been a bumper year for live sport, with the Olympics and Paralympics, British Open Golf and Wimbledon just a few of the events that have provided hours of entertain- ment for armchair enthusiasts – and that’s before players in the Premier League had even kicked a ball. With growing crews and an ever-increasing range of cameras on the market, Andy Stout reveals how OB firms cover key events in the sporting calendar.
BRITISH OPEN GOLF CTV FOR ESPN, GOLF CHANNEL AND US
ONLINE CHANNEL iTV
Units used OB9 and OB10 Cameras 50+
How did you get involved in this OB? Hamish Grieg, technical director, CTV We were the incumbent when ESPN came along in 2010, ending ABC’s 50-year association with the tournament. We started back in 1988, and to give you an idea of how different it is now, then it involved about 10 cameras.
What do you supply to make it all happen? HG This year we have 34 cabled cameras, six RF cameras and other specialist cameras. The main units are our OB10 and OB9 trucks, and we tie their Calrec sound desks and comms together. We also have two cable trucks, a scaffold truck, and two buggy tenders. We have out-boarded equipment into something like 22 cabin areas. The largest is the ISO Palace (ESPN’s VT area), which features 10 x 47-inch monitors, each fed with 16 x or 24 x multiviewers. It has four opera- tors and two producers at the front, then there’s another raised area with a dozen monitors with quad splits and another production team at the back, along with three 40-inch monitors. We use about 45 camera crew, many of whom come from the US with ESPN, and
about 50 engineering staff. We have 30 net- worked EVS servers, 17 IPDirector systems and four Avid edits – two full-blown and two laptop systems. ESPN brings over its own SAN and we also bring in another 8TB for archive. The tapeless workflow side is mas- sive. We only have five HDCAM VTRs on the show now, where once it was more than 20.
Any standout features, such as speciality cameras? HG We have a NAC Hi-Motion II, an Inertia Unlimited X-Mo for ultra-slow motion, six reverse-tee robotic cameras and three mobile fairway cameras – all for remote tracking. We also have a side-mount Flir, attached to a plane, which can fly as slow as 50mph and times its runs to pick up the golfers teeing off. In 2012, they changed the rotor blades on the plane to give the aircraft a constant audio frequency that we can then dial out.
Is there one bit of kit you would single out without which the project would fall apart? HG It’s such a big job, there’s no one piece. It’s 95% fibre nowadays so we need that. But if we didn’t have the display equipment or the massive router power we get by combining three ProBels together, we’d be in trouble.
British Open Golf: CTV used more than 50 cameras this year, up from just 10 in 1988
22 | Broadcast TECH | September/October 2012
What challenges did you have to overcome to ensure all went without a hitch? HG The rain was so heavy before the start that the course was almost flooded and buggies were almost banned on it because it became such a mud bath. Luckily that changed. The beauty of fibre is it’s water resistant. You can even leave the cable in a bucket of water as long as you have strong splices. It is just such a vast production; our com- pound takes up more space than the BBC’s, and it’s the host. Because there are three or four production areas and three production teams, the biggest challenge is keeping track of all the changes. There is always advancement, additions, deletions and trials of new equipment. It’s a year-long exercise. Our first meeting for next year is in October, and that’s later than usual because of the Olympics.
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils
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