CSN Houston s Innovative On-Site Production Earns Emmy Nod

To tip off its 2013-14 NBA season, Comcast SportsNet Houston took its signature SportsTalk Live outdoors to join the Houston Rockets Lift-Off Party in front of Toyota Center. The workflow that made this production not only possible but cost-effective has since earned the CSN Houston team an Emmy nomination for Technical Achievement.

From 5 to 6 p.m. on Oct. 30, CSN Houston broadcast SportsTalk Live from the main concourse area of the Houston Rockets' home venue for the first time ever, before turning attention to the game itself. Roderick Morris, who served as chief engineer and project designer, deployed three Sony PBW-F800 cameras, two muxed through ASI hardware via The Switch back to CSN Houston's control room and one sent over the Internet.

We built the box that will allow us to take multiple signals and mux them down one transmission path, and, through that, we're able to produce the game and send the game back to the station on one of those mux ports, says Morris. We're able to supply up to two cameras on any of the other available ports and only pay for one transmission line back to the station.

CSN Houston uses JPEG2000 for game production but opted to incorporate MPEG-2 for the SportsTalk Live broadcast. Adding in MPEG-4 for the Internet feed, the network needed three encoders on-site to deliver content back to the station, located three blocks away. A Sony HDC8-702 camera-mounted encoder supported the MPEG-2 show.

We use that to overcome cable-distance limitations that you normally see when you're dealing with HD-SDI, explains Morris. We use that encoder [to] transmit an HD-SDI signal. Once it's wrapped into an ASI wrapper, we can transmit that up to 492 ft., and that allows us to continue to use the copper infrastructure of most stadiums, if not all stadiums, and not have to employ fiber optics.

Morris's team made several in-house modifications to an Evertz encoder for the Internet stream and selected a Cisco JPEG2000 encoder for the game broadcast. Once the three feeds are transmitted to the station, decoders matching the individual codecs automatically decode the streams.

SportsTalk Live features daily panel debates and discussions about the hottest topics in local, regional, and national sports. Guests for Rockets Opening Night included CSN studio analyst Calvin Murphy, play-by-play announcer Bill Worrell, color analyst Matt Bullard, and former Rockets Mo Taylor and Moochie Norris.

With one on-site production for CSN Houston under his belt, Morris plans to deploy the workflow for future productions. In the meantime, he and contributor Chris Frazier are up for a Technical Achievement Emmy for Maximizing Available Bandwidth Without Sacrificing Quality at tomorrow night's Lone Star Emmy Awards.

To sum it all up, we had a three-camera shoot with a return feed all utilizing and leveraging technology to the highest possible point, says Morris. It went well. We were maximizing our resources to the utmost limit, and we were able to pull off that three-camera shoot. It didn't require any assistance from the production truck, so the production truck was able to focus on preparing for the game. It was great.

LINK:	http://sportsvideo.org/main/blog/2013/11/csn-houstons-innovative-on-si...
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