Live from Super Bowl LIV: Game Creek Video 10-Truck Presence Drives Fox Sports Stadium Production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Sunday, February 2, 2020 - 12:35 pm
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Super Bowl LIV features a super presence from Game Creek Video, with 19 trucks and 45 technicians on hand to support clients like Fox Sports, NFL Network, and ESPN. And when it comes to the production of the big game itself Game Creek Video is front and center with 10 trucks supporting the Fox Sports efforts at Hard Rock Stadium.
Brian Nupnau (left) and George Bailie are overseeing a Game Creek caravan of 10 trucks for Super Bowl LIV.
The game coverage will be produced out of Encore A, B, and C with support out of Edit 4 for things like audio sub-mix,4K, mixed reality, and pylon shading, says George Bailie, Game Creek Video engineering manager. Cleatus A and B will handle the pre-game show while Edit 2 will support the pre-game, pre-game audio sub-mix, 8K, and vendor support. Bravo will do the kickoff show and also be our primary backup to Encore and B5, which was at Opening Night earlier in the week, has now joined the mix on site.
Getting the core trucks in place took a lot of travel, especially given that the NFC Championship Game was in San Jose, CA just two Sundays ago.
It was almost the last place you would want that game to be played given the need to get here and it resulted in an abbreviated set-up schedule here, says Bailie. But a massive amount of drivers moved Encore, Cleatus, Edit 2, from the West Coast to here in 60 hours. Not enough credit can be given to that side of the effort.
Game Creek Video Encore and Bravo A are all located in a separate compound area closer to the Hard Rock Stadium.
One challenge in the set up was that there are three compounds: one right next to the stadium where Encore and Bravo A are located (the game trucks are near the stadium so they can feed analog signals up to the booth in case of issues); a second Fox compound where the remainder of their trucks and trailers are located; and then a third international compound (Game Creek's Gridiron is there to support ESPN's domestic efforts on Super Bowl Sunday).
The result is what Bailie believes is more miles of fiber transport in a footprint this size than anything that has ever done.
It's not just the cameras but the data and audio, says Bailie. Even truck-to-truck muxes had to be broken out so they could be shipped across the street and that's a heavy lift.
Multi-generational effort
Super Bowl LIV is giving Game Creek Video the unique opportunity to bring three generations of facilities, SDI based, hybrid SDI and IP, and all IP, together for the biggest event of the year.
Encore was our first IP truck for Fox Sports [and has an Evertz router] and Bravo is the first IP truck that uses a Lawo IP router, says Brian Nupnau, Game Creek Video, engineering manager. They all have the same design concept, so they tie together very well, he says. And the networking infrastructure that we have is same from truck to truck.
With respect to the 1080p/HDR production, Bailie says the Game Creek Video team was fortunate to have a season of Thursday Night Football so that Encore and the engineering team are well versed in the differences.
The production progressed through the year and we had a lot of time to fine tune things, says Bailie. Anything that originates in Encore is native HDR and we have 100 channels of AJA FSHDR in Encore to handle SDR conversion. The biggest challenge was the 3G workflow.
The regular season workflow did need to be tweaked for the Super Bowl given that the international broadcasters and others are making use of the camera and audio signals being gathered by Fox Sports.
We spent a lot of time having to fine tune the actual tags on the signals to pass HDR, so there are a lot of things that need to be considered beyond the colorimetry because here we are sending signals to the outside world, says Bailie.
The outside world connects to the domestic efforts via the FATS (Feed A Truck Signals) cabin in the center of the domestic compound. The cabin has a massive Evertz EQX router that is maxed out and, ultimately serves out audio, video, and data signals to all of the entities on site.
We also have a highly utilized Evertz EXE router in Encore and then and the two Evertz EQX routers in Peacock are also almost completely maxed out, says Bailie. It's an absurd number of crosspoints.
The Game Creek facilities across the board are running on 3Gbps infrastructure, a key part to enabling the 1080p/HDR efforts. Even the consumer monitors that are used on sets are 3G capable.
The scale of the 1080p HDR Super Bowl show required additional gear to be brought in. For example, a single EVS XTVIA network with 29 replay servers (believed to be the largest ever) had to be tested and ultimately deployed for the production.
We needed to find all of the EVS XTVIA replay severs, all of the Sony HDC-5500 cameras we could find, and that was a huge challenge to pull off, says Bailie. It's been nothing short of amazing.
Lawo and Evertz are the two main core routing systems that Game Crek is using and when the newer Lawo-based units were built it was important to make sure they could connect without any compromise to the Evertz-based trucks.
We were able to layer in a way so that everything presents itself the way everyone is used to, says Bailey. And with all of these different players in the mix, timing is still the big issue and it is so crucial. And with things like different offsets for different systems there is a lot more time making sure the signal timing is perfect.
The end of Super Bowl Sunday will be no rest for the weary when it comes to the Game Creek and Fox production teams. The Daytona 500, up the road in Daytona, FL, will be he
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Live from Super Bowl LIV: Game Creek Video 10-Truck Presence Drives Fox Sports Stadium Production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
