Live From The US Open: USTA Makes Leap to HDR; Rights Holders Expand Presence Across Grounds

Live From the US Open: USTA Makes Leap to HDR; Rights Holders Expand Presence Across Grounds By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Monday, September 2, 2024 - 10:24 am

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The US Open Tennis Championships are now in their final week of action and with respect to the USTA's broadcast operations the big news is the move to 1080p for all the courts as well as HDR on the five show courts. And, as has been the case every year, the rights holders and the USTA work closely to continue to expand their presence at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens.

Rights holders have the ability to shoot talent from this studio location in Arthur Ashe while matches are being played on the court.

We've definitely seen an increased on-site presence with some partners, which is great, says Dayna Navatta, USTA, Director, Broadcast Operations. Telefonica [from Spain] and SKY Sports have increased their on-site production with full commentary teams and Italy's SuperTennis retained their stage in Ashe. We encourage all our rights holders to come and do more on site and it's exciting when their full production teams are here to take advantage of all the angles and opportunities we offer them.

One new angle, literally, involves a second broadcast platform that has been constructed at the top of Arthur Ashe stadium and overlooks the entire stadium.

For us it's really looking at what our partners are asking for and how we can improve their experience and coverage onsite, says Navatta. So, we created a second platform up in Ashe Stadium that is almost at roof level but gives a unique bird's eye view of the court behind the talent.

Navatta says the location is extra popular because rights holders can film from it even while play is happening on the court below.

Partners can do their standups from up there and it doesn't interrupt play, so it really gives that I'm here, this is what you feel' look that is different from the standard court-side whisper seat where you've got to be quiet during play. And now we're thinking about what we can do similarly in Armstrong or the outer courts.

The biggest technical enhancement this year has been the move to 1080p HDR for the world feed and move away from providing 1080i feeds. We don't do any interlace on site at all, says Petro Mnych, USTA, Director, Technical Broadcast Operations Previously we've made progressive and interlaced available but this year we're setting a standard that it's 1080p and then, obviously, when it gets to a rightsholder they can do the conversion to interlace in their own ecosystem.

Mnych says the move to HDR was a multi-team effort that involved the USTA, NEP, EMG Gravity Media, and ESPN. The core of the HDR coverage is the five main show courts, Arthur Ashe Stadium, Louis Armstrong Stadium, Grandstand, Stadium 17, and Court 5.

That has been the biggest thing that we've really pushed to do this year and obviously that has a huge knock-on effect to what we were doing on the outside courts which are still SDR as well as our legacy archives that are also obviously SDR, Mnych explains. We had to put a lot of workflows in place for recalling those clips and then getting them up-LuT'd to HDR because the world feed is fully HDR. We also had to establish how many feeds of HDR we are doing, how many are available in SDR, what are we making available to partners and what are we archiving in HDR.

The good news for the USTA is that both NEP and EMG Gravity Media have experience with HDR, albeit different. One of the first questions that had to be answered is which Look Up Table or LUT would be used to transform the color and tone of the HDR images.

We asked ESPN and Gravity to define what LUT they are most comfortable with, and the decision was made to use the BBC lut, says Mnych. Fortunately for us, ESPN did a lot of Wimbledon in HDR, and they came here with some good learnings from Wimbledon. And that was important because there is a huge effect on things like SMT or Hawkeye and graphics that have to be able to work in this flavor of HLG. We weren't just coming in blind and trying to figure it out as the event was going.

With respect to cameras and HDR most of the cameras are already HDR capable with the switch of a button while others, like some robotic cameras in the player's tunnel, had to be replaced with newer versions.

Any camera source on the primary show courts with the exception of the Netcam and a few others are natively HDR, says Mnych.

The control rooms also have added HDR monitoring as well as AJA FS-HDR converters for uplutting SDR signals but for the most part Mnych says the HDR operations have been centralized into a quality control and engineering area rather than requiring wholesale changes. Camera shading is being done in SDR as there are still 12 courts that are being captured in SDR.

Even though almost all the cameras on the five show courts are natively pulling in HDR, making sure that they're solid in SDR just makes it kind of smoother for everybody who's taking the ISOs because we have more people taking SDR than HDR, says Mnych. For the most part it's been good and it's always challenging with tennis with skin tones or the LED walls that can change color to not blow things out.

Mnych says those looking to make the move to HDR should begin with plenty of testing and planning, walking through all the workflows followed by making sure the right people and resources are available to assist on creating new processes.

There are some very good engineers that we had access to that had done a lot of HDR work and kind of knew some of the pitfalls and some of the risks we were up against, he adds. That was hugely beneficial, and we were a

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