EMG on board to help Sky Sports offer atmospheric coverage of the PDC World Darts Championship By Michael Burns
Thursday, December 14, 2023 - 11:18
Print This Story
With 3,000 passionate fans descending on London's Alexandra Palace for three weeks, the live broadcast of the 2024 PDC World Darts Championship might pose a monster challenge for Sky and EMG.
However, with years of experience covering the event, and innovations like a cine-style FanCAM on hand to capture reactions, the coverage seems likely to score another bullseye.
Starting tomorrow (15 December) and concluding on 3 January 2024, the whole tournament is being shown on the dedicated Sky Sports Darts channel, with highlights on Sky Sports Main Event. EMG is on hand to facilitate coverage.
You have to be pretty precise with your rig there's going to be 84,000 people weighing those seats down and a lot of beer trickling through them you don't want to be moving around under there for the next few weeks.
EMG deputy head of cameras Chris Pendlebury has been the camera supervisor for Sky's production on this event since 2017.
It's a massive event. We're up to 26 operators a day for 16 days, with double sessions throughout those days, he says.
On the EMG side it's a technical guarantee role: looking after the camera kit, getting it all in the right place, making sure it's all working. On the client-facing side, I have lots of conversations with Sky, trying to figure out what works best for them, how they can get the best production with the tools we have available and with their budgets.
Double top
The rigging workflow for such a long and labour-intensive event is both helped and complicated by the fact that EMG has also been covering the 2023 Mosconi Cup at Alexandra Palace this month. Reconfiguration for the darts started as soon as the pool tournament ended.
Cameras being rigged at Alexandra Palace
There's been a lot of forward planning in that regard, says Pendlebury. You have to be pretty precise with your rig. There's a lot more seating built for the darts and there's no access to some of the ducts. There's going to be 84,000 people weighing those seats down [there are 3,000 fans on each of the 28 days], and a lot of beer trickling through them. So if they've forgotten something by now it's going to be a lot of trouble to put it in. You don't want to be moving around under there for the next few weeks.
For the World Darts Championship, the production is all on site. Darts can't be a remote production until there is a time-traveling vision mixing desk, suggests Pendlebury. The cut is so fast that if you were to try and do a remote, you would be basically doing it without cue lights. The technology just does not exist yet.
On site is NOVA 111, an SDI-based truck regularly used by Sky for cricket coverage.
Beyond the slightly different rig for us, once it gets going, the majority of the production is all the same as when we use our IP trucks, particularly from the camera side of things. So we don't notice a lot of difference from IP, but it's nice to be doing it in baseband as we used to.
New perspectives
In terms of coverage, Pendlebury says darts is the opposite to a lot of other sports.
With darts, a lot of the main coverage is the detail and then everything else is used to bring the viewer into the event. That requires our main coverage to be really precise. We've got our robotic cameras down the front, supplied by a third party, and we make sure they're all programmed right and working flawlessly. We spend a lot of time on cherry pickers, lining up a series of locked off Sony 4300 cameras on the hanging truss, getting our angles right and making sure that nothing's going to be blocked.
EMG deputy head of cameras Chris Pendlebury
The truss cameras use Canon CJ45 4K zooms.
We need that massive zoom to really get those details, even though we're probably less than 10m away, he says. We also use the HD cut out function in the 4300s, to offer a two for one shot. The top half of the board is framed up and we use the HD cut out to really move in on the Treble 20, which is what players are often aiming for.
What we found in the past with using those lenses is that the depth of field can be so shallow that you can have the point in focus, but the flights of the dart are out of focus, so occasionally it can look like a muddy picture. Whereas the function we use takes an HD cut out of the UHD picture, with the effect that the picture looks so much crisper, because the depth of field is so much greater. I'm not sure many other people are using that HD cut out function. But it's really worked for us.
Party atmosphere
There's also the first appearance on Sky Darts of the FanCAM Cine camera system, a collaboration between ACS and EMG Connectivity. This was introduced after a handheld RF camera in super slo-mo mode worked so well last year.
FanCAM is a DSLR [a Sony A7SIII] on a gimbal, that allows us to bring a different look and a new set of replays to the walk-ons in particular, says Pendlebury. It gives you that slightly more cinematic, more dramatic look. It has the ability to record in the head and play back those clips over RF, which means they are available to the EVS operators in a way that they weren't before.
We do all that in 4X: the player walk-ons, or after breaks and other reaction shots where they're pumping themselves up for having taken out a massive finish.
It's allowed us to have some more access on stage, because our operators are now able to get up close to some of the players, access that was negotiated on the basis of it not being a massive camera.
With the main coverage so often looking at the detail, it's nice to bring in some of the other st
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
EMG on board to help Sky Sports offer atmospheric coverage of the PDC World Darts Championship By Michael Burns 
