NBC's 25th Kentucky Derby Production Features Two Live Drones, RED Cine-Broadcast Cams, Four Nucleus Ultra-Slo-Mos, and 5G iPhone Gimbals

NBC's 25th Kentucky Derby Production Features Two Live Drones, RED Cine-Broadcast Cams, Four Nucleus Ultra-Slo-Mos, and 5G iPhone Gimbals Over the years, coverage has grown way beyond a single horse race By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S.

Friday, May 2, 2025 - 2:21 pm

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In the 25 years that NBC Sports Group has been broadcasting the Kentucky Derby, its coverage has gone from a 90-minute broadcast on a single broadcast network to a multi-day extravaganza of racing and pageantry that includes 12-plus hours of live programming - and 17 total races - across NBC, USA Network, and Peacock.

It's a monumental endeavor that requires months of planning and coordination, a crew of hundreds onsite and at NBC Sports Group's Stamford, CT, studios, and an attention to detail that is second to none.

Mike Tirico (left) will anchor Saturday's Derby coverage along with analysts Randy Moss (center) and Jerry Baily.

The Kentucky Derby is a can't-miss event every spring, says Ken Goss, EVP, remote and studio operations, NBC Sports. I'm proud to work with talented and tireless technical and operations teams to provide the infrastructure and backbone for production and the announcers to present a best-in-class show every year.

The Churchill Downs Lab: A Test Bed for Production-Tech Innovation It's not just about the volume of coverage, however. NBC's efforts on the technology side at Churchill Downs have grown by leaps and bounds as well.

This year's Run for the Roses broadcast will feature a wealth of new cutting-edge cameras and production tools, including two live drones (one for racing, one for pageantry), RED Digital Cinema's new 4K 60p cine-broadcast camera system on the red carpet, four 1080p HFR HDR Nucleus cameras (up from two last year) on the finish line for both dirt and grass tracks, iPhone cameras capturing immediate live reactions from owners/trainers, and a Proton Cam with micro pan/tilt head in the New Starting Gate Pavilion area by the touchscreen area.

This year's 68-camera complement includes a variety of new tools as well as some NBC Sports Derby staples.

The team is also outfitting a Canon EOS C80 6K full-frame cinema camera on a wireless RF gimbal setup and deploying a Sony PDT-FP1 portable data transmitter for C2C use.

In addition, immersive-experience-tech provider Cosm will be at the Derby for the first time, placing cameras around the track to provide views of all the action to fans at Cosm locations. An SRT feed offering a live look-in during the races will be sent from the Cosm LA dome to be integrated into NBC's broadcast.

This year's Derby is particularly exciting for many of our teams at NBC Sports because of its unique intersection between sports and entertainment, says Kamal Bhangle, director, live event workflow and remote engineering, NBC Sports. Like during our Olympic broadcasts, we're able to debut several new technologies and workflow efficiencies. Our goal is to evaluate [their] performance at Churchill Downs and determine how they might benefit our other properties across our portfolio and make a big, ambitious Derby show even bigger.

RED Camera Brings a Whole New Look to Red Carpet and Beyond NBC will be using a new RED cine-broadcast HFR camera running in 4X super-slo-mo to capture fashion, the red carpet, and scenes from around Churchill Downs. It marks one of the first integrations of RED Digital Cinema's all-new advanced cine-broadcast solution, which supports live broadcasting of up to two channels of 4K 60p (HDR/SDR) via 12G-SDI and IP broadcasting compliant with SMPTE ST 2110 (TR-08) and up to a 4K 60p JPEG-XS feed.

The RED camera is primarily something we will use on the red carpet to cover fashion and flavor of the day, says Schanzer. What's special about it is, it's a first-time use case where the RED camera footage - which we traditionally use in a postproduction way, where it gets filmed, exported, dropped into our edit system for postproduction bumpers that we build - will go directly into EVS for our use in the truck so we can turn it around in real time as part of our live coverage.

The system features a robust LEMO SMPTE 311M/304M hybrid fiber optical cable connector linked to a rack-mountable 2RU full-rack or 4RU half-rack base station. The module further expands workflows with advanced slow motion, AI/ML enhancements, and real-time 8K 120-fps R3D streaming through the RED Connect license-enabled feature.

One of the most interesting features, which debuted at NAB 2025, is the integration with the EVS XT-VIA live-production server. This allows broadcasters to enhance their workflows with up to 4X super-slow-motion at 4K and 1080p, while simultaneously delivering two baseband channels through the RED cine-broadcast module. This capability is powered by RED's license-enabled RED Connect feature, which enables IP live streaming of R3D cameras and unlocks advanced workflows.

NBC will also be testing the system's camera-to-cloud capabilities, such as those with AWS and RED Phantom Track functionality, which captures final pixel and green screen simultaneously from a single V-RAPTOR XL [X] or V-RAPTOR [X] camera and allows productions to distinctly monitor or broadcast each track independently.

Double the Drones, Double the Fun For the first time, Beverly Hills Aerials will send up two live drones, one providing race coverage and the other capturing the pageantry between races. Traditionally, NBC has used a heavy-lift drone on Derby Day primarily to cover the races with a bit of pageantry mixed in. However, this year, the heavy drone will be used exclusively to cover the racing, and a new lightweight, more agile hummingbird drone will cover the spectacle around the grounds.

It will allow us to f

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