4K For Coach K: ESPN Throws Massive Farewell for Legendary Duke Coach's Final Home Game at Cameron Indoor Stadium A 30-camera, native 4K game production, as well as College GameDay and ACC Network studio shows are all on site in Durham By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Friday, March 4, 2022 - 3:42 pm
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When Mike Krzyzewski stepped onto the floor of Cameron Indoor Stadium for the first time as the head coach of the Duke University men's basketball, it was on November 30, 1980 in a 67-49 win over Stetson. The game wasn't televised.
It will feel a little bit different on Saturday as ESPN will offer wall-to-wall coverage of the iconic coach's final home game. From College GameDay to a native 4K* broadcast of the Blue Devils' matchup with arch-rival North Carolina (6 p.m. ET, ESPN), to an alternate MegaCast viewing option on ACC Network, the Worldwide Leader is leaving no corner of Cameron untouched in what it's calling its largest men's College Basketball telecast ever.
A crew of more than 200 ESPN staffers is on-site for wall-to-wall coverage of Coach K's final game at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday. Set up has been on-going since Wednesday. (Photo Courtesy of Michael Sullivan, ESPN)
It's a once in a lifetime moment for us, says ESPN Senior Coordinating Producer David Ceisler. It's an exciting thing to have the opportunity to present this game. We've been working all season for this game and we are going to deliver something that's going to be really special.
A Game Production for the Ages ESPN was just over a year old at the time of Coach K's arrival at Duke. It was on December 5, 1979 when the emerging cable network first produced a live college basketball game broadcast a matchup between Wisconsin and DePaul. You could say that ESPN and Coach K have grown up together. So, its fitting that more than 41 years later that it's the ESPN juggernaut that's here to celebrate this momentous finale with a production compound of eight trucks and an on-site crew of more than 200 staffers.
Faction Media's Justin Amash gathers b-roll using the handheld camera rig that will be used as a live RF camera during the game broadcast to capture shallow depth-of-field shots. (Photo Courtesy of Michael Sullivan, ESPN)
ESPN is preparing a fully-native 4K show that includes a whopping 33 game cameras. The arsenal features a two-point cabled aerial camera system (SupraCam) that's rigged to fly above the Cameron Crazies, nine Fletcher robotic cameras, a shallow-depth-of-field handheld rig (the operator will use a Sony A1 camera with a 50mm prime lens on a DJI OSMO gimbal), a full-sensor Sony HDC-4800 camera at a slash position with a FUJINON SK 20 35 full-sensor Cinema Box lens shooting primarily shallow depth-of-field shots of Coach K on the sidelines (the same setup used last season on Monday Night Football), a live drone flying outside the building, and much more.
The 4K game broadcast will be produced out of Lyon Video's Lyon 14, which is the same unit that supported ESPN's weekly 4K game during the college football season. The game broadcast will be feature a front bench of producer Eric Mosley, director Mike Roig, and technical director (TD) Jack Kramer. Associate Director is Susan Pierce and the broadcast is actually utilizing two iso producers to support the game's needs: Kevin Clark and Kyle Brown.
While a load of attention will be on the main of the hour, Ceisler notes that, at the end of the day, the crew still holds the all-important duty of serving the game first; a game that just so happens to be a matchup between two legendary rivals, each with 20+ wins this season.
I think if we don't properly document the game, then we're in the wrong business, says Ceisler. I really do and I think Coach K would be the first one to say that, too. So we want to cover it properly: the right replays, the right commentary that we want within a broadcast. Within that, were we able to create some of emotion, transport viewers into the history, the people, the achievements, the milestones, and the trajectory of Coach K, then I'll be really happy.
#CoachK's Day, ESPN has it covered
ESPN Front Row (@ESPNFrontRow) March 4, 2022
The Opportunities and Challenges of Cameron As anyone who has worked or attended a Duke basketball game at Cameron Indoor will tell you, it's an experience unlike anything else in sports. It's big time college basketball in a venue smaller than most high school gyms. So for the ESPN operations team, it wasn't as simple as big show = more resources. The cozy confines required the ops team headed up by Operations Specialist Michael Sullivan, Operations Manager Catherine Carroon, and Operations Coordinator Tatianna Montalvo to get creative in its planning.
The limited space means finding more spots for cameras like robotics and the SupraCam, which was actually used here once before for a Duke-UNC game in 2019. Sullivan notes that this time around the SupraCam does have more Z space mobility, meaning that it can raise and lower in addition to track left to right.
Since this is such a tight arena, we had to figure out different ways of adding cameras and resources, says Sullivan. It's not like we can just go add a traditional camera position and a camera body. It has to be more robotics and aerial cameras.
In fact, space is at such a premium that only three of the nine Fletcher robos in the venue will be operated in the building. The other six were outboarded to the nearby Wallace Wade Stadium, the home field for the Duke football team. Those six operators are working out of an announce booth there with the ops team cross-patching fiber from that booth down to the truck dock and out to the
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4K For Coach K: ESPN Throws Massive Farewell for Legendary Duke Coach's Final Home Game at Cameron Indoor Stadium A 30-camera, native 4K game production, as well as College GameDay and ACC Network studio shows are all on site in Durham By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
