Inside Gravity Media's Effort To Power the 154th Open Championship Production

With 42 RF cameras and high-power radio mics deployed, the spectrum environment is challenging at the coastal Royal Birkdale golf club

The Open Championship is underway at Royal Birkdale in Southport, UK, about an hour north of Manchester, and Gravity Media and European Tour Productions (ETP) sit at the center of the TV production, which involves more than 170 cameras of all shapes, sizes, and types and one of the more ambitious RF-camera deployments in memory.

We've got 42 RF cameras operating in the 7 GHz and 2.5 GHz spectrum, and we've filled that spectrum up, says Hamish Greig, director, golf, Gravity Media. On the audio side, we have our high-power radio mics and on-course kits, so we're once again maxed on the spectrum on that side as well.

Given the course's coastal location, DAB signals from Wales and elsewhere in Northern England make the RF noise floor very high (five times higher than normal levels) and very challenging to work around. Gravity Media's RF and Specialty Camera division has been up to the challenge, which Greig says is important for a course like Royal Birkdale.

We're running extra receive sites and differing heights to tackle the problem, he explains. But RF is needed here to get the camera crew everywhere they need to be: the grandstands, the championship village, and the course, behind hillocks, bunkers, etc. With cabled cameras, we have the standard tees, fairways, and greens covered, but, for everything else, we need the RF cameras.

You cannot do golf without RF cameras, he continues, especially when you are on-air from 6:30 in the morning to 8:30 in the evening. You need that flexibility to cover all stories for the respective groups.

From left: Gravity Media's Greg Livermore, Jackie O'Shea, and Hamish Greig at the 154th Open ChampionshipThe core of the compound for the Open Championship, as it has been since 2017, is a large IBC building comprising production-control rooms, replay areas, and audio rooms (and equipment racks). It is home to both the world-feed-production team and the NBC Sports team (the Sky UK team continues to cut its show remotely from Osterley Park). The core IBC building is just one part of a large compound that also houses Gravity Media production units and portable cabins and facilities.

Among the 170 cameras this year are six bunker-camera systems, seven super-slo-mo cameras, Sony F5500's in the studio, a wire cam, drone, plane and seven robotic cameras, many POV cameras, and, of course, lipstick tee cameras. The 550M wire cam runs from the 18th hole across to the top of the 1st hole and ending at the Clubhouse and can also cover the 9th hole.

We've got more robotic cameras than we have ever used before, says Greig. Gravity Media handle all of those specialist cameras as well, including the wire cam, the minis, lots of POVs, and the robos.

The compound also exemplifies the kind of cooperation that makes the Open Championship unique.

It's a partnership, not a vendor-client thing, says Greig of the relationship between ETP, Gravity Media, NBC Sports, the Golf Channel, Sky Sports, IMG, and others. We value them so much because they are friends and they are clients, but they are our partners in making pictures. We all have the same aim, which is to make the best production we can with the facilities we have. And the good thing is that we all pull together and that's across the board. Everyone is like a big Open family.

More important, everyone helps as needed.

It's great to be the main vendor here because we have a diverse supply of everything required to produce coverage, says Greig. If it's managed, we can make a pool of resources available for everyone. And that happens on the manpower side as well. If one production needs a little more help to do something, we know where the resource is tied up or not and if it's available. We're there to help everyone to make it the best it can be for everone's experience.

The Open Championship was last held at Royal Birkdale in 2017, and, for Greig, thinking back to that event reveals just how far technology and golf coverage have come.

In 2017, drones were still in their very early days, and we were using a lot of Sony HDC-2500, HDC-4300, and F5 cameras, he recalls. Now we're all Sony HDC-3500's with some Sony F5500's, SLR cameras, and XMOs. We also didn't have Hawk-Eye back then, and now it's being used for 200 sources.

The biggest change, of course, is the one rippling through the entire industry: remote production.

We're now doing six of the productions remotely, which wasn't a thing in 2017, Greig explains. Sky UK's productions are remote. Golf Channel's Live From and the R&A's Live at the Range are remote and were not even productions in 2017. Both Marquee groups are fully remote as well as the Player Focus feed, which previously would have been Three-Hole coverage.

Along with the technology and workflows, there have also been two changes to the Open Championship. This year's event featured the Inaugural Heroes Classic, which was played on Tuesday, with three teams (Team Scheffler, Team Harrington, and Team Yamashita) playing a three-hole tournament, and Last Chance Qualifier on Monday, with 12 players competing for the final slot at this year's Open.

The Heroes Classic was quite fun, notes Greig. The Last Chance Qualifier was covered with ENG cameras and then edited for a package that was available the next day. That production also had one camera with LiveU and Starlink connectivity to send video and audio back to Stockley Park for integration into The Live at The Range program.

A Full Calendar and Weather Challenges

This is the busiest time of the year for us, he explains. We had an LPGA event in Evian, France, which ha

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