Fox Sports' FIFA Women's World Cup Operation Takes Technical Step Forward, Leverages L.A. Facilities Improvements are based on lessons from two previous World Cups By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Friday, June 7, 2019 - 9:32 am
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The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup is under way in Paris today, and its beginning marks the end of a long period of planning in which Fox Sports made use of skills the team developed in Canada, home to the previous Women's World Cup in 2015, and in Russia during the Men's World Cup last summer.
The Fox Sports ROC at the IBC for the FIFA Women's World Cup consolidates operations to shrink the equipment footprint.
Our spirits are good, and we are ready to kick off the tournament and show everyone back in the States what we've been working on, says Kevin Callahan, director, technical operations, Fox Sports. We'll have all the things covered, and we're ready.
One of the first things viewers will notice is the studio-show set, which is located at the Caf de l'Homme. Paris has plenty of iconic views, but it is the sight of the Eiffel Tower that resonates with people around the world, and the view from the Caf , part of the Musee de l'Homme, will not disappoint.
[EVP, Graphics,] Gary Hartley and his team designed a magnificent set, says Callahan. There was only one rule: don't mess up the view. The set blends into the museum as much as it can, and the back house of the restaurant has been turned into our operations and production office.
Callahan notes that the studio has 10 cameras, including a 50-ft. SuperTechno50 crane with a Stype kit for augmented-reality graphics that can show sweeping shots of the Palais de Chaillot and the Trocad ro. There is also a beauty camera that uses LiveU's Matrix IP cloud video-management platform to make it available to Fox TV stations that want to integrate live shots into their newscasts.
LiveU is the backbone for ENG shoots that are not at a stadium, says Callahan. Their new LE600 gear is very reliable, particularly here in France, as it helps us get content to multiple locations simultaneously.
There are three shooting locations: the main set, a caf set, and a shooting position for the digital team, which is located on the second terrace. From there, the digital and social-media team will produce FIFA Women's World Cup Now for Twitter every night of the tournament.
A combined team from Fox Sports, IBM Aspera, Levels Beyond, and Telestream is working together at the IBC for the FIFA Women's World Cup.
We've taken over every square centimeter of space there to maximize efficiency, says Callahan. Down the hill is where our technical compound is located. NEP's Aurora OB truck is there as our control room, and we have 40 Gbps of data leaving that compound: 20 Gbps to Los Angeles and 20 Gbps to the IBC in Paris.
One interesting note is that the EVS XT-VIA operations, graphics, and playout are done in Los Angeles and the technical director in Paris is cutting to tape machines located in Los Angeles, not in a B unit.
We basically moved the B unit 6,000 miles away, notes Callahan.
Similarly, the graphics team in Los Angeles controls three Viz engines in Aurora, and the prompter crew is also working remotely. Bexel helped outfit two trailers located in Fox Sports' Pico studio lot, and a Century Link trailer helps pull in 120 Gbps of data from Paris.
We experimented in Russia with our night-time prompter being in Los Angeles, adds Callahan, and now we are doing it over IP for all of our shows from Paris.
The Fox facility in Los Angeles also built two rooms for off-tube needs because all audio and video passes through a control room in Los Angeles. The commentary, whether off-tube or onsite, will be matched with a UHD feed that will ultimately be downconverted to 720p for distribution to viewers.
Last year, we couldn't do that because Camera 1 of the UHD feed was a different camera and had a different view, Callahan explains. So we needed two separate workflows.
Fox at the IBC
This is the first time that a Women's World Cup has had a proper building for its International Broadcast Center (in 2015, the IBC was housed in office trailers). Although Fox has a relatively small footprint of only 300 sq. meters, it will pack a lot of technical punch. NEP UK, as it did in Russia last year, is providing the equipment and technical support.
It's our technical hub for interfacing with the venues and HBS for match coverage, says Callahan. It is also the hub for ingest and our archive system that is required for features and is the source for all of the feeds that those in the remote tape room in Los Angeles need.
There are 60 staffers onsite at the IBC, and Callahan says that FIFA stepped up with a proper IBC. He adds that having all the matches produced in UHD is another improvement over 2015.
The number of feeds has also increased, and the availability of those feeds has made it significantly easier for us to have a consistent product from all of the matches, he says. The host services are much more aligned with the men's tournament, like having fully equipped presentation platforms. FIFA has gone out of its way to make TV as important as everything else around the tournament.
At the core of the IBC facilities is what Fox is calling the Remote Operations Center (ROC).
We've merged all of the technical rooms - like transmission, venue engineering, ingest, and media management - and the assignment desk so that they have the same set of monitors and can talk to each other directly, explains Callahan. There is a space saving, but they are also all looking at the same thing on one monitor wall.
Another key improvement from FIFA is that access to the content on the F
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Fox Sports' FIFA Women's World Cup Operation Takes Technical Step Forward, Leverages L.A. Facilities Improvements are based on lessons from two previous World Cups By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
