Beijing 2022: NBC Olympics' Dave Mazza on Producing Primetime in Stamford, the Challenges of 1080p HDR, and Navigating the Pandemic The at-home operation is bigger - and more complex - than ever for the Beijing Games By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor
Friday, February 18, 2022 - 1:00 pm
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Since joining NBC prior to the 1996 Atlanta Games, NBC Olympics SVP/CTO Dave Mazza has seen it all over the course of 13 Olympic Games with the Peacock (17 in his career). But he has been floored by the challenges his team has faced in broadcasting the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and is experiencing the Olympics in a whole new way.
For one, this marks the first time in Mazza's Olympics career that he isn't onsite in the host city overseeing the broadcaster's gargantuan operation at the International Broadcast Centre. Instead, he's at NBC's Sports Production Operations Center (SPOC) in Stamford, CT - along with 1,500 other NBC staffers. In fact, because of China's extensive COVID-mandated closed loop, the majority of NBC's Beijing 2022 production is being handled remotely in Stamford with a much-reduced crew of roughly 600 onsite in China.
SVG sat down with Mazza to examine the operations in both Stamford and Beijing and how they are different from those of every other Games he has been a part of. He also discusses how his team managed the ultra-quick turnaround from the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games last summer, the introduction of 1080p HDR workflows into the Stamford plant, the previously unthinkable task of producing NBC's Olympics 2022 Primetime show remotely, the effect of having all NBC commentators announce the action remotely, and how he and his team have maintained their sanity during one of the most treacherous stretches in live-production history.
David Mazza (right) and Errol Foremaster, VP, Engineering Operations, NEP, in Studio 3 in Stamford
First, let's go back to Tokyo. How did your team deal with the turnaround of just six months heading into the Beijing Games?
Everything was constantly changing and moving right up through Opening Ceremony.
Two days before Closing Ceremony in Tokyo was when we decided to move the Primetime control room home [to Stamford instead of Beijing]. We were two days away from starting to tear down, and we had to act quickly to divert a bunch of [equipment] that we needed for conversion to do HDR in Stamford. We pulled a bunch of stuff out of the racks that would've been headed for China and sent it instead to Stamford - monitors, scopes, and various things we needed for HDR that we didn't have in Stamford yet. Everything else shipped to Beijing. Then, [VP, Engineering,] Tim Canary's and [VP, Post Production and Digital Workflow,] Darryl Jefferson's teams had to very quickly convert PCR-2 [in Stamford] and bunch of Edits and Ingest channels to be able to do the Primetime show in HDR.
NBC had to quickly convert its PCR-2 in Stamford, as well as edit systems and ingest channels to be able to do the Primetime show in HDR.
Speaking of HDR, can you detail what was required in Stamford to make that transition to 1080p HDR for the Beijing Games?
Anytime we have made any kind of [engineering] refresh changes over the last three years in Stamford, we have been installing 3G and 1080p HDR-ready gear, as we knew we'd be switching over to HDR [in the future]. However, any changeover was further out on our roadmap. So it was still a big lift to get everything configured and tested in time for the Primetime show. Add to that, the SPOC team was still getting their new IP router to settle down.
During Tokyo, the big lift was at all the venues for [NBC Olympics VP, Venue Engineering,] Chip Adams and his team and all of the OBS team, who had to get going in 4K HDR and 1080p HDR or the first time ever at an Olympic scale. HDR in the Tokyo IBC was more straightforward, because the whole of the NBC IBC pretty much ran in HDR. We had two flavors [HDR and SDR] floating around in the new Grass Valley IP router, but most of the SDR was headed home to Stamford, which had almost all SDR for the cable shows. The only exception was the trucks we pulled up to the building for Golf and Beach Volleyball, which were doing HDR, but those feeds were contained in the truck. So Stamford didn't have much HDR in the building.
When the shift home was made for Beijing, nearly all of the over 200 feeds coming into Stamford had to have an SDR and HDR copy because we have to make both copies available for the different rooms. PCR-2 is running in HDR with five or six EVS [servers] and about 10 out of 55 edits running in HDR, but all the other PCRs and Edit rooms are running SDR. And keep in mind, all those rooms are running in 50 Hz as well - with the exception of PCR-8, which is in 60 Hz because it's handling Golf [Channel]. It was quite a challenge to get that all square
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Beijing 2022: NBC Olympics' Dave Mazza on Producing Primetime in Stamford, the Challenges of 1080p HDR, and Navigating the Pandemic The at-home operation is bigger - and more complex - than ever for the Beijing Games By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor 
