Live from Super Bowl LIII: Mercedes-Benz Stadium Scoreboard Operations Improve Tech Ahead of Big Game By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Sunday, February 3, 2019 - 10:46 am
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The team at AMB Sports Entertainment, the subsidiary of AMB Group that oversees the scoreboard technical facilities and operations at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, gave their facilities a technical facelift to ensure it is ready to meet the expectations of Super Bowl fans and also lay the groundwork for future growth.
(l-to-r) Gaines Johnson of Evertz, Ben Dolinky of AMBS E, Allan Canney of Evertz, and Jason Cothern and Pete Soto of AMBS E have worked hard to get the scoreboard operations Super Bowl worthy.
We have a fully IP infrastructure and we expanded it for the Super Bowl as our existing system was repurposed and, now, we have room for 56 additional sources and destinations without adding extra gear, says Ben Dolinky, AMP Sports Entertainment, video engineer.
The biggest technical change was the addition of a second Ross Xpression Tessera system. The Tessera system can manage multiple Ross XPression BlueBoxes, the high-end 3D graphics engine found in the Studio version of Xpression but without the user interface. At Mercedes-Benz the Tessera powers a system with seven BlueBoxes, six of which are dedicated to the Halo board, ensuring that broadcast images can be scaled in realtime and in sync across those six BlueBoxes. The halo 360-degree video scoreboard at Mercedes-Benz Stadium requires all of that processing power but even that single Tessera system has its limits.
There is no way to build a show and run a show at the same time in a single Tessera system so with two we can build a show while the other is running a show and then fire a salvo stack to go from one to the other, says Dolinky.
The second Tessera system also gives an additional level of redundancy for the Super Bowl as the two systems will run in parallel.
The Ross Dashboard control system allows the operator to control the router so that if one of the six BlueBoxes goes out we can make a route to the other BlueBox in the other stack and no one will know, says Dolinky.
In addition to Tessera, Ross provided two fully loaded Acuity switchers for the MBS control room, two Carbonite Solo switchers to drive an additional display, the Mega Column, with a 1416 by 2016 resolution, and openGear to integrate with other production equipment, along with supporting training and creative services.
The Mercedes-Benz Stadium team also increased the number of Grass Valley cameras that will be in use for the in-house coverage of the Super Bowl from nine to 12.
We were wired and integrated for 12 cameras so all we had to do was plug and play available IP gateways (IPGs) to get the cabling in, he adds.
One vision for the future is the possibility of creating a mobile cart system that can be moved around the venue and provide a camera hub for special events or live hits. That system can be patched into the network and the camera sources connected to that cart can be received in the control room.
The Evertz EXE router in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
One interesting aspect of the facility is that the Ross equipment IP standard is SMPTE 2022-6 while the Evertz EXE router makes use of ASPEN. The team installed Evertz IPGs directly inside the Ross frame and signals come out of the Ross gear as 2022-6, gets converted to ASPEN, and then out of the Evertz router via SDI. Signal monitoring is done in ASPEN but Dolinky says a nice part of the Evertz EXE router's design is it could shut down and they would still be able to get video to the Halo scoreboard.
There will also be an interesting legacy to the fiber connectivity that the NFL installed to connect Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena. The two facilities were never connected before but now they will have the ability to drop IPGs in the routers and be able to share resources with the production team at State Farm. The next step will be to link the two Evertz Dreamcatcher networks.
The technical advances are all part of a continual evolution at Mercedes-Benz Stadium. When it opened its doors two years ago the question facing the production team was how do they take advantage of the unique Halo scoreboard in a dynamic and satisfying way for fans?
Pete Soto, AMB Sports Entertainment Group, senior director of game presentation, says it took a lot of trial and error and the team spent about three years prior to installation imagining how they can make a truly great show. And it wasn't only the Halo: there was also the Featherwall and Megacolumn displays to consider.
It was a whole new world and there was no one to ask, How did you do this?' so there were a lot of sleepless nights, he recalls. But you stay ahead of the technology to constantly innovate.
Jason Cothern, AMB Sports Entertainment, director, stadium operations, says the second year is when the team really developed and learned the techniques that could be best applied to the various type of events held at the Stadium.
Due to our knowledge with Dashboard we learned how to deliver a show more efficiently and to fire a nice clean show, he says.
It seems that every major new stadium this year is looking to stand apart by expanding the definition of what a scoreboard should look like and be capable of. Inglewood Stadium, which will be home to both the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers will have an Oculus that will be a double-sided scoreboard that is 50 feet tall and 120 yards long.
When you do something new you need a testbed and our ownership listened to us and allowed us to build a system off site six months in advance of opening that had six monitors set up from left to right, says Cothern. That mock-up Halo was priceless, and we were able to use 90% of the equipment here at th
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Live from Super Bowl LIII: Mercedes-Benz Stadium Scoreboard Operations Improve Tech Ahead of Big Game By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
