Live from Dublin: NEP delivers Nebraska vs Northwestern remote NCAA Season Opener for Fox Sports By Fergal Ringrose Thursday, September 1, 2022 - 11:54
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Nebraska on the drive at the NCAA Football Season Opener on Saturday 27 August
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Football Season officially began on Saturday 27 August as the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Northwestern University Wildcats faced off at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin for the 2022 Aer Lingus College Football Classic. This was the first time in Ireland for both Big Ten teams, who partnered with Irish American Events (IAE) for the Week Zero game.
IAE first organised a fixture in Dublin in 2016, when Georgia Tech took on Boston College. A proposed meeting between Notre Dame and Navy for 2020 was scuppered by the pandemic, as was 2021's game, which was to have been between Illinois and Nebraska in Dublin.
Saturday's Season Opener was the first time Fox Sports and the Fox Sports App have broadcast and streamed a college game from Ireland, and the first time the team has undertaken a remote production at such a distance - with 16 fibre streams direct to the Fox hub at Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles and eight returning feeds to Dublin in under one second.
Fox sent a scaled-down crew to Dublin to augment the NEP Broadcast Services Ireland facilities provision on the ground, with match director, producer, on-air talent, graphics and some of the EVS replays all located in the LA production gallery.
It was also the first time a college game has been shot in Ireland in native 1080i 59.94, so that it appeared as if it was just another production anywhere within the United States.
When I landed in Dublin on Wednesday I had already gotten an email saying LA was seeing bars from NEP Connect. So right off the bat the video back and forth was happening. Sure, we had to do a little bit of work at our end to get some data for different things, but all in all it was a very good process.
NEP Ireland deployed its Lir OB truck for the main match production and Spirit for the in-stadium screen presentation, with NEP Connect providing dual 10Gpbs IP/fibre trans-Atlantic transmission bandwidth from a JPEG 2000 Net Insight Nimbra encoding platform at the stadium for the 16 camera signals.
A mix of Sony HDC-4300 Super Motions, HDC-3500 and HDC-2500 cameras covered the game, with one 4300 mounted on a Chapman cart running on the near sideline. The official replay service was provided by regular college football contractor DVSport, with SOS Global handling shipping.
This is our first time doing a game in Ireland, Brad Cheney, Fox Sports, VP field engineering & operations, tells SVG Europe. We do the majority of our college football remotely, and so this just became another one of those games, especially with a lot of early season games for us back in the States. Considering the turnaround for our crews of people, it made a lot more sense to do it remotely.
The only real challenge we found as we went into this broadcast was the distance between Dublin and LA, where we produced the game, and obviously making sure that in working with NEP Ireland we found the right camera crew and the right people to help us pull off a broadcast in a sport that happens only maybe a couple of times a year in Ireland.
L-R: Brad Cheney and Thomas Lynch, Fox Sports, with Adam Scarff, NEP Ireland
The crew was mainly Irish. We brought over two camera operators, two audio people and one replay person to help support and teach the coverage of American football, says Cheney.
We haven't really encountered any issues at all. I think the beneficial thing is working with a group of people at NEP with whom we feel very confident to be able to produce the show remotely this way, with the technical expertise of NEP Ireland and NEP Connect to make this happen, involving multiple Gigs of bandwidth from Dublin through the UK and across the pond to New York where it then hopped across to Los Angeles with a safe and diverse route all the way through. We had NEP Connect engineers in Los Angeles supporting us, alongside the full engineering crew in our LA production centre.
We had nine cameras and four EVS operators in Ireland with three back in the US, he adds. We ran four Super Motion cameras, with the four operators in Ireland running the Super Motion playbacks, and then our normal compliment in the US.
On this broadcast, we were using JPEG technology so the latency was less than half a second round trip, to and from Ireland. It was great. Our team is actually used to having a higher latency because in the States we do a lot of satellite and HEVC encoding - so we're more towards a second [of latency] on a normal basis.
Shooting in Ireland as if it's the USA
Alan Burns is managing director of NEP Broadcast Services Ireland. From our point of view this is different because it's the opening weekend of college football and they're super-busy in the States and then the NFL begins, he explains. Fox didn't want to lose a full 20-30 people for seven days, with travel in and out and so on - where they could maybe do two jobs in the States in that time. That was one of the triggers why they wanted to do this one remote.
On top of that, we suggested they talk to NEP Connect and through all sorts of calls and meetings we now have a bigger pipe in the Aviva Stadium which allows us to send 16 videos from the Aviva to Fox Sports headquarters in Los Angeles.
The other thing is we're doing this as if we were in America, says Burns. We're shooting in 60i [59.94] not 50i, because it saves standards conversion on every signal and also because the lights at the Aviva have been upgraded to LED flicker-free - so this is the first time we have ever done a 60i production here. Otherwise you wou
