CFP National Championship 2025: Van Wagner To Hype Up Buckeyes, Fighting Irish Fans From New IP-Based Control Room Facility was upgraded prior to latest Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United seasons By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor Monday, January 20, 2025 - 11:33 am
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Fans of the two best college football programs in the nation - the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish - will fill Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium tonight for the title game of the College Football Playoff National Championship. The venue will be alive with excitement, and the Van Wagner crew will fire up the fans even more with a videoboard show from a new IP-based control room.
The in-venue production team during rehearsals at Mercedes-Benz Stadium over the weekend
This has been one of our lighter shipments of equipment because of the new workflows, says Patrick Stedman, tech manager, Van Wagner. The building can pretty much handle most of what we need.
IP-Driven Show: Team Adapts to New SMPTE 2110 Workflows Mercedes-Benz Stadium isn't unfamiliar territory for Van Wagner. The in-venue-production company played a role in back-to-back major events shortly after the stadium opened in 2017: the CFP National Championship in 2018 and Super Bowl LIII in 2019. A lot of the LLED video displays are still the same, including the massive Halo Board above the playing surface, but the behind-the-scenes workflows received an upgrade after the conclusion of the 2023 NFL season. Among the changes are routers upgraded to SMPTE 2110, new Ross Video Acuity production switchers, and a communications backbone bolstered with 35 Riedel Bolero beltpacks.
I supported their NFL games for the Falcons during the 2023 season, so I know the facility relatively well, says Stedman. The bulk of their workflows went to IP, and they're still in that process: they're building a secondary control room to produce smaller shows without activating their full control room.
The view of the field from the control room
When the venue opened, the massive Halo Board display was one of the largest double-sided LED fixtures in any building. Now seven years old, the stadium is still a huge draw for fans and still requires much coordination and planning in laying out content. After many seasons of Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United games, populating the display and executing a show with it at the center has become easier, but the new IP-centric workflows need to be factored in.
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It's an added layer, notes Daniel Zerunyan, senior producer, Van Wagner. There have been little challenges that have taken away from our programming time, but preparation has gone really well. We were lucky that the Falcons didn't have a home game because a bunch of contingency plans were put in place. It wouldn't really impact us if there was a game two weekends ago, but, if there was one this past weekend, we would have been in and out of the control room.
Collaborative Effort: Stadium Staff, Ross Video Offer Helping Hand As with any large-scale show that Van Wagner participates in, the host stadium's internal staff and vendors are crucial to the show's success. In this case, the staffers responsible for Falcons, Atlanta United, and other sports events at Mercedes-Benz Stadium are assisting on the production and operations fronts. From Stedman's point of view, any tech or engineering inquiries have been answered by Chief Broadcast and Network A/V Engineer Cole Gallagher. Zerunyan's team worked with Senior Director/Executive Producer, Game Presentation and Stadium Productions, Julia Chongarlides, but the main production contact has been Producer, Third Party Events/Game Presentation, Steve Smith.
The IP-based control room will house Van Wagner's crew as well as staffers from the stadium.
A key contributor to many of Van Wagner's shows, Ross Video Senior Graphic Programmer, Content and Workflow, Sports and Live Events, Josh Weber is onsite to manage and troubleshoot graphics-related issues.
Josh has been helping us on the content side of things for the last few years, including at the NCAA Final Four, says Zerunyan. [The stadium] has full-timers that handle a lot of their XPression [solutions], but he's working with their in-house team and being our lead [contact] that reports to their team.
Telling the Story: Production Folds-In Content From Each Program's Postseason Run The culmination of the college football season is an opportune time to tell the fans in the stands how each university got to the championship game. In previous years, Van Wagner would mix in regular-season highlights with footage from their respective semifinal games. In the new era of the 12-team expanded playoffs, Zerunyan and company couldn't possibly fit everything in this short hype video played before kickoff.
We're just going to focus all of our footage from the College Football Playoff and not the regular season, he says. Since they played in the first round [of the bracket], we had more footage to utilize from ESPN and Two Circles, the social team that the CFP hires.
Another view from the control room
With the Halo Board available, Van Wagner is supplementing its open with other elements. An NFL-style venue offers a variety of capabilities for entertainment in the lower bowl, including a top-tier lighting system that adds to the cinematic atmosphere.
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