Live From The Open Championship: CTV OB Tackles New Course, IP By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, July 19, 2019 - 1:05 pm
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The 148th Open Championship is into its second day of competition at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. The last time the Open was played at the course was 1951 so it's giving some fresh energy to the CTV OB and ETP Production teams. And the effort has seen some Open Championship firsts for the production, including the first time the compound has been located on a beachside parking lot and the first time CTV OB had to shut down a compound as biblical rains during a set-up day caused serious flooding.
The compound at The Open Championship at Royal Portrush is the first to be on a parking lot.
We literally had to shut down the compound and then the next morning raised all the power onto platforms, says Alan Jessop, CTV OB technical producer. We solved all the issues and then brought everything up again.
The rain has continued off and on during the tournament, but it has not impacted operations. One blessing is the paved and level compound, which is a first for an Open, at least as far as memory serves.
Richard Morton, CTV OB, head of projects, says he has not come across anyone who has not enjoyed working in a regular shaped and paved area.
It enables us to be parked together closely in a tidy fashion as often on a golf course the compound is on undulating ground, he says.
The beachside parking lot is home to 11 CTV OB remote production, 17 support trucks, catering, and office trailers and the core of the production includes 175 cameras as Hamish Greig, CTV OB, CEO, says the tightness of the course allowed for a reduction in the number of cameras.
You are always looking to make savings where you can but not let it be seen on screen, he says.
RF cameras and mics are also part of the mix as there are 29 RF cameras, 79 low-power radio mics, 50 high-power radio mics, and more than 600 walkie talkies. There are also 35 EVS XT3 servers and an EVS VIA server which is being used for UHD and HDR coverage of holes 5, 6, and 7.
We have 13 UHD Sony HDC-4300 cameras and a Sony P50 camera there shooting in HDR Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) for DirecTV [in the U.S.], says Greig.
Paul Francis (left) and Richard Morton of CTV OB are at the center of technical operations at The Open.
Paul Francis, CTV OB, CTO, says the VIA servers is an upgrade from an XT4 which was used last year.
It has two more inputs so they can follow more golf in UHD and HLG and if you walked up to the control you would not know anything was different, but it has eight times as much bandwidth, he says. It's quite impressive.
There is also a lipstick camera at the first tee box, rail cameras at holes 1, 3 (being the tee box), 6, 13, and 16. Four locked-off POV cameras, one Smarthead POV camera, and nine bunker cameras are also part of the plan and 11 holes are cabled for Toptracer (there are also two RF Toptracers, one for NBC and one for ETP which produces the host feed).
Entities in the compound include ETP, Sky Sports UK, NBC, The Golf Channel, TV Asahi, the BBC, and BBC and IMG Radio. Studios are located across the course for NBC (host and main studios), a Golf Channel studio for Live from The Open, the Sky Sports Open Zone set on the practice range, and then a BBC studio.
The Infrastructure
Royal Portrush has held its share of tournaments, including the Irish Open and the Seniors Open. That means there was an existing fiber infrastructure but Boston Networks, which is hired by the R&A to provide fiber infrastructure, worked closely with Jessop and the CTV team to install two rings of fiber around the course. Those rings are managed to provide redundancy in case of an incident like a fiber cut and they provide more than 1,500 strands of connectivity. There are 17 nodes across the course making it possible for various production resources to tap into the fibre and deliver video and audio signals.
Some of them are main nodes that are in concrete and will remain in place (but out of site hidden under gorse bushes, etc. while there are sub-nodes that are under things like grandstands or scoreboards, says Jessop.
Power requirements are being met by Aggreko and FTVS as they supply power to the compound as well as the nodes around the course.
The density of facilities on each requires good quality redundant power so we have twin generators that are monitored, says Jessop.
There have also been a couple of improvements, one of which is that all of the audio needs were streamlined and are now in one cabin.
We have audio submix with RF audio and MADI all together with Ian Smith, head of audio, in the middle of it all, says Jessop. Bringing all of audio together is a great advantage.
Broadcast RF gear now resides in the OSCAR machine room area.
Another change is that Broadcast RF have also been integrated into the OSCAR (Outside Source Central Apparatus Room) main distribution center, a move that eases compound cabling and improves operations in other ways. Last year the MST graphics for the world feed machines moved into the OSCAR.
Having MST graphics for the world feed along with Toptracer computers and Broadcast RF racks alongside the EVS servers in one room helps communication, lengths and amount of cabling, and also offers more compact architecture for the system, says Morton. It's also more comfortable for the engineering and production teams to work as the production team doesn't have the noise of machines.
Adds Francis: Third party suppliers are coming to us and they want to bring their kit into the machine room and have it in the racks with everything else. They are seeing the benefits of being in the production area without the whir of computers. There is more space to work and they can focus on the
