Road Warriors 2018, Part 2: The Top Sports-Production Highlights of the Year

Road Warriors 2018, Part 2: The Top Sports-Production Highlights of the Year By SVG Staff

Monday, December 24, 2018 - 1:11 pm

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2018 was one of the most eventful years for sports production in recent memory, with the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics and 2018 FIFA World Cup capturing the nation's attention over the summer and annual events like the College Football Playoff National Championship Game, Super Bowl, NFL Draft, and others breaking production records and test-driving new technologies and workflows. As if there weren't enough going on stateside, this year's Road Warriors features an expanded look at what went on across the Atlantic. Here's is Part 2 of SVG's look at some of the sports-production highlights from the past year (CLICK HERE for Part 1).

U.S. OPEN

Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Shinnecock Hills, NY

June 14-17

The 2018 U.S. Open from Shinnecock Hills Golf Club gave the Fox Sports team challenges in production planning that led to innovations, the opportunity to refresh old workflows and core infrastructure, and a chance to chart some new directions for golf coverage.

The front-bench area in Game Creek Video's Encore truck was at the center of Fox Sports' U.S. Open coverage.

Game Creek Video's Encore production unit was at the center of the coverage for Fox and FS1, with Game Creek Pride handling RF-video control and submix and providing a backup emergency control room. Pride's B unit handled production control for one of the featured groups, Edit 4 supported all iso audio mixes, and Edit 2 was home to five edit bays with equipment and support provided by Creative Mobile Solutions Inc. (CMSI). There was also the 4K HDR show, which was produced out of Game Creek Maverick.

All the Sony HDC-4300 cameras on the 7th through 18th greens are 4K HDR-native with a secondary output at 720p SDR, noted Brad Cheney, VP, field operations and engineering, Fox Sports, during the tournament. There were also six Sony PXW- Z450's for the featured holes and featured groups, the output of two of them delivered via 5G wireless.

In terms of numbers, Fox Sports had 474 technicians onsite, making use of 38 miles of 24-strand fiber-optic cable to produce the event captured by 106 cameras (including 21 wireless 1080p, 21 4K HDR units, six 4K HDR wireless units, three Inertia Unlimited X-Mo cameras shooting at 8,000 fps, a Sony HDC-4800 at 960 fps, and three Sony HDC-4300's at 360 fps), and 218 microphones. Tons of data was passed around: 3 Gbps of internet data was managed, along with 83 Gbps of broadcast data, 144 TB of real-time storage, and 512 TB of nearline storage.

Each course provides its unique challenges. At Shinnecock Hills, they included the roads running through the course, not to mention the hilly terrain, which also had plenty of deep fescue. But, from a production standpoint, the biggest issue was the small space available for the compound.

One big step taken in preparation for the 2018 events was that the IP router in Encore was rebuilt from scratch. RF wireless coverage was provided by CP Communications. There were 26 wireless cameras on the course, along with 18 wireless parabolic mics and nine wireless mics for on-course talent. CP Communications also provided all the fiber on the course. - KK

CLICK HERE for SVG's full coverage from the U.S. Open.

FIFA WORLD CUP

Russia

June 14 -July 15

Ever since launching in the early 1990s under the charismatic direction of President David Hill, Fox Sports has made a habit of shaking up and disrupting the sports-media business in the U.S. You could say it's in their DNA. That tradition continued when, for the first time in network history, Fox Sports carried live English-language coverage of the 2018 FIFA World Cup for audiences in the U.S.

Fox Sports' studio analysts in the network's Red Square studio

Fox Sports rolled out an impressive production effort in Moscow and around the globe, broadcasting every match live across Fox, FS1, and Fox Sports Go. And, although the tournament itself lasted only a month, the effort, which involved the entire Fox Sports family, was years in the making.

The core World Cup efforts were centralized in Moscow, with Fox Sports teams at the IBC and the main studio at Red Square. But that was just the beginning: there were talent and technicians at each of the venues, as well as a large team in Los Angeles handling match control, editing, and other duties. The key was to leverage the work done by FIFA and HBS to provide comprehensive match coverage, technical infrastructure, and production services.

At the end of the day, I think the product Fox Sports has put on with the help of HBS has been fantastic and second to none, said Kevin Callahan, VP, World Cup operations, Fox Sports, during the event. And that's what it should be.

At the center of the IBC operations was a production-control room that was focused on match coverage and prepped the signal before it was sent to Los Angeles, where the master-control team readied it for delivery to viewers. An important part of the ecosystem was 10-Gbps circuits between Moscow, Frankfurt, and Los Angeles, as well as 1-Gbps circuits between the venues. Those circuits allowed the Fox Sports team to embrace remote production and home-run productions, such as having the nighttime studio show from Red Square cut from Los Angeles.

With much of the creative team for World Cup Tonight in Los Angeles, the challenge for the technical team was to make the workflows as seamless as possible. That meant changing some workflows that had been used at the 2015 Women's World Cup and the 2018 Confederations Cup. At those events, ingest and live-playback operations were combined. For the 2018 World Cup in Russia, those groups operated independently, and the ingest team h

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