Live From Tokyo Olympics: Dave Mazza Reflections on a Unique Games Experience By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, August 6, 2021 - 10:21 am
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There are two days to go in the Tokyo Games, and, at this point, many of the thousands of broadcast professionals have started to head home. Others are staying for the Paralympic Games. But all of them, like Dave Mazza, SVP/CTO, NBC Sports Group and NBC Olympics, are reflecting on an Olympics experience that, for more than a year, has been unlike any other before.
Dave Mazza (left) and Errol Foremaster in Studio A at the NBC Olympics IBC facility.
We came in with a bit of trepidation because the extra year of planning saw a plethora of new, good ideas from production to enhance the coverage, says Mazza. And then we were also trying to make good on some very aggressive technical initiatives. It made the plan better, but, for every bit of better that it got, it was more daunting as to how we were actually going to pull it off when we were not even sure how many of our crew would make it into Tokyo. Now I am very pleased with how it has all gone, even though, early on, we had a few near misses, but that has made the accomplishments all the sweeter.
Invariably, an Olympics effort is always compared to previous ones, whether it be ratings comparisons, the scale of the show, or the production achievements. Mazza says the Tokyo efforts were about three times more complicated than the 2016 Rio Games. First, a doubling of the complexity around new technologies and workflows like IP, HDR, 1080p, and immersive audio. Another step up was due to the complications from attempting such a large-scale production during a global pandemic.
What we did in Rio was no small undertaking, he says. But everybody here has done an incredible job. The attention to detail and, on top of that, the passion that it took for getting it right and getting it done in the middle of the pandemic; the pandemic adds worries about yourself, your family, the rules, the tests. It was a Herculean effort to get it all done.
From a production-element standpoint, Mazza notes things like the Friends & Family effort, which allowed athletes to see and talk to family and friends back home immediately after their event. Born out of the pandemic, it was a complicated effort, often taking a tremendous number of worker-hours to simply get a 10-second shot on-air.
It allows for a super dramatic moment, he says. I remember when one of our cynical ADs yelled from the other side of the room that even he was crying because everybody on screen was in tears. When a special moment like that comes out, it makes it all worth the effort and extra planning.
Another extra effort that paid off was apparent during the Opening Ceremony. The show was already expected to have a very different feel from the typical Ceremony, not only because fans were absent but also because the teams and parade of nations were being handled in a different way. NBC sought to put a camera on the bus with the U.S. team on its way to the Ceremony.
We weren't really sure we'd ever get permission, says Mazza, but we built out all the plans in the hopes that we would be able to do it. A surprising number of things that we were looking to do came true for us.
I think that somebody was really looking out for us, he continues. Two of the organizations that were looking out for us are OBS and TOCOG 2020. They have a lot of very hardworking people whose efforts made everything [we] needed possible.
Tech Reflections From a technology standpoint, the big lift this year was to create a wide variety of video formats floating through the ecosystem in Tokyo, the U.S., and Sky in the UK. OBS provided content in 4K HDR and 1080p SDR, which NBC Olympics then intermixed with its own 1080p HDR as the primary production format. But there was also 1080i SDR, which NBC used for all the cable and digital feeds to its Stamford, CT, facility. On top of that, NBC Olympics in Tokyo handed off an HDR signal in the HLG standard to the NBC playout facility in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, where it was flipped to PQ and emitted via HEVC compression.
From a technology standpoint, the big lift this year was to create a wide variety of video formats floating through the ecosystem in Tokyo, the U.S., and Sky in the UK. OBS provided content in 4K HDR and 1080p SDR, which NBC Olympics then intermixed with its own 1080p HDR as the primary production format. But there was also 1080i SDR, which NBC used for all the cable and digital feeds to its Stamford, CT, facility. On top of that, NBC Olympics in Tokyo handed off an HDR signal in the HLG standard to the NBC playout facility in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, where it was flipped to PQ and emitted via HEVC compression.
We did our best to get to one format and stay there, says Mazza, and that worked really well. We pretty much normalized anything we had to 1080p HDR, and, once we got there, it was easy.
He notes that the work around HDR that NBC Sports undertook for Notre Dame Football for three seasons paid off big time. The team was able to develop its own set of LUTs (look-up tables) to allow color space from one format to be properly mapped to another.
We probably experimented with 10 or 15 versions of LUTs during the Notre Dame games, he explains. It ultimately got us to a really good point. It's one of the reasons we haven't had trouble with HDR.
The improvement offered by HDR, 1080p, and immersive audio, he notes, is dramatic and noticeable, especially with proper compression rates and formats. HEVC compression looks really good at the bitrate we're using. But we can't squash it any further, as has happened to HD, because then it won't look very good. So we're very pleased with how it looks now.
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