Beijing 2022: OBS Chief Content Officer Mark Wallace Discusses Technology's Impact on Storytelling By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Monday, February 7, 2022 - 12:05 pm
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As OBS Chief Content Officer Mark Wallace is primarily responsible for overseeing all the broadcast and digital content OBS offers to the Rights Holding Broadcasters (RHBs). It's a big role, especially given that he oversees ceremonies, live feeds, clip feeds as well as content for VR, the Olympic Video Player, the Olympic News Channel, and more. I have an incredibly talented team around me who project-manages all these products, so my role is to ensure that globally all this content works together both editorially and creatively, he says. The following is an interview with Wallace that appears in the OBS Media Guide.
Mark Wallace, OBS, Chief Content Officer
What has it been like planning during the pandemic?
The Beijing 2022 Organizing Committee has helped us greatly in working with the Chinese government to get our personnel on the ground. For some venue surveys, this has meant for some people flying into Beijing on a special charter flight and then staying in their bubble of airport to hotel and venue, then back again, a process which required a great amount of planning.
There have been many, many virtual meetings. We have also used an innovative system, called the Venue Simulation System (VSS), which has allowed us to look around the venues in a virtual way. This solution has been developed by the Beijing Film Academy early in the planning phase, with the support of the Organizing Committee, the IOC, and OBS. It renders a 3D copy of the venue where you can add various elements from Look of the Games to actual broadcast facilities such as camera platforms. Our producers could then determine which cameras were needed for the coverage and place them on the platforms and footprints to assess the shots from these positions and adjust their coverage plan if necessary. This 3D wireframe world gives you a good idea, and therefore was a useful planning tool. We will probably use it again as a planning tool in the future.
One of our coordinating producers, Haiwei Bobby' Wang, has been based in China for the last two years, and he has been very busy doing a lot of work for all the Producers and others. He's been going to test events, filming videos, taking photos, and working closely with the International Federations. This has been invaluable for our planning.
The planning for these Games hasn't been an easy task, but we are used to it after Tokyo 2020 where we had our esteemed colleague Makoto Nakamura based in the host city, therefore we were able to make it work with no major problems.
How has the short turnaround since the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 affected OBS's plans?
We started our planning for Beijing 2022 before Tokyo 2020, so we were in pretty good shape when the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games ended in 2021. Most of the planning was finalized before the Tokyo Games so we only had to fine-tune our plans in the short period of time between Tokyo and Beijing.
Last winter, some of the TV directors went to survey the venues to look around and understand what could be achieved in terms of coverage. They took photos and shot videos, so we knew what we needed to do to achieve an Olympic level of coverage.
Coming off the back of Tokyo, the team had a short rest of two or three weeks, and then it was foot down' again.
How has the scale of production grown from PyeongChang 2018?
It is bigger, because every feed of every sport and every discipline of that sport will have an accompanying Multi Clip Feed (MCF), which is a secondary feed that shows unseen shots and angles that did not make the multilateral feed. Those are from some of the high speed slow motion and specialty cameras installed at the venues together with athlete arrivals and warm up. It's the first time in an Olympic Games that we will have an MCF for every sport and every feed.
The MCFs have been very well received by the RHBs since their introduction at Sochi 2014 in alpine skiing. Since then, it has expanded greatly. It allows us to feed far more content to the broadcasters to either use for analysis or montages, though, for Beijing 2022, some broadcasters are even planning to stream it live. The MCFs popularity means we need to consider carefully with each sport what content goes on it. As such, it means there are more feeds coming out from Beijing 2022 than from previous Winter Games. It will represent twice the amount of content compared to PyeongChang 2018.
Multi-camera replay systems are part of the Beijing 2022 OBS production plan.
The other area of increase are the multi-camera replay systems. This is where there are a number of SLR cameras on a rail or truss, and they are all recording the action simultaneously. When we play this back, it allows us to freeze an athlete and move around the action, moving backwards and forward which can look very dramatic and allows more analysis. We used such systems at PyeongChang 2018 at figure skating, ice hockey, short track speed skating, and halfpipe, and in Beijing we will have 10 systems, which is a huge increase from four in PyeongChang 2018.
The quality of the images is improving from Games to Games, with smoother movement and now many of the systems are on a gimbal, so one can actually change the location of where they're recording. The holy grail' is to follow the athlete around and we're moving in that direction.
RHBs can of course take this content onto their digital platforms so it can go on to their social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Those shots sometimes become viral, and people start to talk about it. It is on a timeline so people can move backwards and forwards on it to look at the athlete,
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Beijing 2022: OBS Chief Content Officer Mark Wallace Discusses Technology's Impact on Storytelling By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
