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Les succès ne frappent jamais au hasard : ceux qui réussissent, ceux qui gagnent sont d'abord des personnes qui ont cru en elles.
[Dominique Glocheux]
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As the first season of Superleague Formula draws to a close, Visions can look back on a job well done! Launched in August of this year, Visions has been on hand to capture all of the action at the six races held across Europe this season and are contracted for a further nine races next season.
The Superleague Formula is a combination of two of Europe’s favourite sports, motor racing and football, with up to 20 identical cars racing in the colours and livery of football teams from around the world. Participants include AC Milan, Anderlecht, PSV Eindhoven, Glasgow Rangers, Sevilla, FC Porto and Olympiacos.
Going into the final race, which will take place this weekend at the Jerez circuit in Spain, Beijing’s Guoan Rigon leads the pack, closely followed by Dutch club PSV Eindhoven, Liverpool FC and AC Milan, all of whom are in contention to claim the championship crown.
For the event dubbed “The Beautiful Race”, Visions customised its multipurpose Voyager unit to deliver production facilities for the cars on board cameras, providing a driver’s eye view of all the action. The unit includes edit facilities and a dedicated graphics area, as well as a 50 screen monitor stack to review all of the footage from the cars and incorporate it into the broadcast.
The unit’s range of features including multiple tape and server based record facilities, two linear edit facilities, production monitoring, two EVS server-based multi-channel recorders, VTR’s and a vision mixer has allowed Voyager to offer similar features to those of a conventional OB truck combined with the benefits of separate areas for graphics and editing. Voyager also has the advantage of being based on an expanding articulated truck chassis allowing it to be moved to virtually any location quickly and easily.
The OB company provided coverage of the event from across Europe at each of the six races held at Donington in the UK, Nürburgring in Germany, Zolder in Belgium, Estoril in Portugal, Vallelunga in Italy as well as the final at Jerez. Visions also covered the test event, held in Barcelona, and have been signed up for a further nine races in 2009.
Andy Tweedley, head of business development at Visions says, “We are delighted to have been a part of the inaugural season of this new and exciting sporting event and are thrilled that our first class solutions has helped Superleague Formula get off to a racing start!”
The first season of Superleague Formula comes to a close tomorrow this weekend at the Jerez circuit in southern Spain but this strange marriage of motor racing and football has been successful enough to warrant an extended run of nine races next year, with UK OB company Visions signed up to once again provide broadcast facilities.
In this twist on motor racing identical cars race in the colours of leading international football teams to combine the enthusiasms of two very tribal sets of supporters. Going into the final race Chinese team Guoan Rigon is some way ahead of the field, with PSV Eindhoven, Liverpool FC and AC Milan in the following pack.
Visions has been using its Voyager nonlinear editing trailer for the Superleague Formula season. It was adapted for the task by having one edit suite turned into a viewing gallery, with 50 monitor screens to show the outputs of on-car cameras before being mixed into the main transmission.
This makes Voyager more like a standard OB truck, incorporating tape and server recording facilities, including two EVS multi-channel systems, and a vision mixer, as well as, graphics, video editing and Pro Tools audio equipment.
HBS has worked with Superleague Formula's in-house host broadcast department SFTV, supplying cameras for the main broadcast signals. Coverage was 16:9 digital standard-definition, with the possibility of adopting high-definition in the future. The 25 cameras supplied by HBS included a super-slow-motion unit, a Jimmy Jib-mounted camera, four minicams, and RF cameras for the pits. On top of this, SFTV put two cameras on each car, bringing the grand camera total up to 65.
Two separate signals were generated in an OB truck, with the world feed distributed by satellite-uplink provider GlobeCast. HBS had a crew of 60 production staffers on-site for each race, working with Infront Italy, which is also involved in the SBK.
Beijing 2008 was a watershed for quite a few pieces of newly introduced OB kit, and no less so than for Arri’s super slo-mo Hi-Motion camera, where seven were in operation covering an impressively wide range of Olympic sports. It was recently put to use by Sky Sports for the England vs. Australia rugby match held at the home of English rugby, Twickenham in London, illustrating Hi-Motion’s growing popularity with directors. Within the first five minutes of the game it provided three replays at 200fps (not the typical 300fps used for rugby due to low light levels in the stadium).
“We have three replay modes now,” says Martin Turner, match director and executive producer, rugby at Sky Sports. “Normal slo-mo, the Sony HD Tri-Motion cameras [two were used in the corners at Twickenham], which provide fantastic quality but only slow you down to a certain level, and then the extremely high quality of the Hi-Motion. A great reaction shot is great in slo-mo, but it’s even better in Hi-Mo.”
Introduced in 2006, the rental-only camera captures images in 1920 x 1080 HD at a variable 12 – 300fps or 600fps, and there are now 17 of the cameras in use worldwide, with 10 based out of Arri’s UK headquarters and three in the U.S. operated by Fletcher Camera.
The Hi-Motion is used by Turner in conjunction with all the usual bells and whistles of the modern OB provided by Telegenic. At Twickenham, he has 11 cameras covering the live match footage, including a railcam, handhelds and a Steadicam, with additional cameras deployed for studio work, covering the player’s tunnel and so on. Eight EVS XT[2]s provide replay material for the game from a special VT section of Telegenic’s new for 2008 T16 OB truck.
Rugby is a complex sport akin to organized and violent warfare, so coverage requires a good deal of knowledge of the game on behalf of the director and the camera crew and great care in showing the viewer effectively what is going on. Fast cuts from mid-range shots that show the positions of players in the pitch to close-ups of the action are part and parcel of coverage.
“It’s fine detail analysis where [Hi]Motion] really makes the difference,” Turner says. “Also, rugby is a game part-verified by a video referee, so to have a tool like this that he can use can prove invaluable in helping him make the right decision.”
Developed by NAC in partnership with Arri Media, the Hi-Motion uses a combination of specially developed components and software and off-the-shelf parts from the likes of Panasonic and Fujinon. It records in native HD using three 2.2 megapixel CMOS sensors. Pictures are recorded directly as uncompressed RGB in the camera head onto 48GB of RAM, providing 22 seconds of slo-mo at 300fps and 11 seconds at its maximum capture rate of 600fps. This is piped using industry-standard SMTPE hybrid fibre to the CCU and then onwards to air, HD EVS or HD VTR.
Typically in sports OB, it records to an EVS XT[2], using one channel for record and one for replay. Currently the operator has to use two panels, one controlling the EVS and one controlling the Hi-Motion, though work is afoot between the two companies to collapse this workflow down to a single panel.
“We thought we knew all about slo-mos, but the Arri camera shows us a world that we had never seen before, such as the moment of impact,” concludes Turner. “It’s that ‘Wow moment’ that Hi Motion gives us.”
After 10 years of casually offering sports broadcasting courses through its Radio-TV-Film department, Texas Christian University is going pro, offering a full-fledged sports broadcasting major beginning next year. To ensure its students receive proper hands-on training, TCU’s former video coordinator has moved his office from the athletic department to the communications department, bringing his 14 years of sports broadcasting experience with him.
One Class At A Time
Chuck Lamendola, instructor of Radio-TV-Film and studio/video production supervisor, put the first sports broadcasting class on the TCU books in 1998. He has been adding courses ever since, both theory-based, like Broadcasting and Sports in a Global Society, as well as production-based, hands-on courses like Post-Production for Sports and Producing Remote Sports Broadcasts.
“In the first basic production class, they’ll learn to do audio, video, set up cameras, and everything that they currently learn on the fly in remote sports production,” explains Lamendola, who has been at TCU for 14 years. “We will try to give them a taste of all the technical stuff they need to know, so that way when they got to the next course, they would have at least a basic idea of what they’re doing.”
Mike Martin helps move students beyond the basics. Now a full-time professor of sports broadcasting after spending a 12-year career as the athletic department’s video coordinator, Martin has the experience to provide hands-on training, while still helping out the athletic department as necessary.
“Because of my contacts with athletics, I’ve been able to get students more involved with athletic productions,” Martin explains. “I can bring those resources that are available within athletics over here to the Radio-TV-Film Department.”
All Hands On
“I think the best thing about the program is it gives students a lot of real world experience,” Martin says. “We can teach them theory, they can read books, but probably the best aspect of our program is they get hands-on experience. They’re the ones producing, directing, serving as full crew members on our shows.”
That hands-on experience comes on a fully digital production facility equipped with four Sony XDCAM 35 cameras, Panasonic P2 HD cameras, Sony DVCAM, a 2-channel EVS system, a Ross switcher, and coming soon, a Chyron character generator.
“We haven’t had a real need for it because all the graphics that we use on the scoreboard have been pre-built,” Lamendola says. “Those are built on our pretty simplistic character generator that we have now.”
The control room is connected to TCU’s football, baseball, basketball, and track venues via fiber, which was a tough task, considering its geographic location.
“We run all our video boards from the same control room, and we are as far from athletics as anybody on campus,” Martin explains. “They’re in the southwest corner and we’re in northeast corner of campus, so building this control room was quite expensive because of the fiber runs.”
TCU formerly used a 48-foot, five-camera production truck that rolled from venue to venue, but “we ran it into the ground,” Lamendola says. “Because we’re in Texas, it gets so bloody hot in the summertime, the truck was sitting out there in the 100 degree heat without proper air conditioning. We decided last summer that rather than upgrade the truck, we would pull all that production into one facility.”
Students now produce shows for all four sports out of that facility, either in a full-on production role or as an apprentice to hired professionals.
Practicing Apprenticeship
For football productions, each student is assigned a mentor from the well-credentialed freelance staff. This year’s football director also directs Dallas Stars games at the AmericanAirlinesCenter, one producer does MLS games for F.C. Dallas at PizzaHutPark, and the other produces Dallas Mavericks games for ESPN. TCU students then fill in the blanks, acting as camera and tape operators, and shadowing the paid crew.
“For the first game we have pretty much a full paid crew and the students shadow, but at halftime we turn the cameras over to the students,” Lamendola explains. “By game two, the students are operating the cameras, both handheld and fixed positions, TD, and everything else.”
Due to sponsorship obligations, professionals always produce and direct the shows, but students fill every other production role, rotating through positions until they have tried each one.
For 2009, Lamendola hopes to add soccer and swimming to the students’ production slate, along with some coaches’ shows. As a member of the Mountain West Conference, The Mtn. television network would be the perfect distribution point for TCU students’ work.
“From our spring documentary class, Mike is trying to get two or three high-quality documentaries that we can offer to the Mountain West Network, to see if they’ll air them,” Lamendola says.
Estimating The HD Jump
Before the 2008 football season kicked off, TCU replaced its football stadium’s video board with an HD version, but with the control room still SD, an upgrade is certainly forthcoming.
“We’re in the process of mapping out a plan to convert all our gear to high def, which is going to take a little while and take some money,” Martin says. “We’re always researching, since the technology seems to change overnight. In my previous position I was responsible for all the gear, so I have a lot of experience doing that.”
As a private university, TCU must rely on the generosity of donors, as well as some help from the athletic department, to budget out that upgrade, but with the board already in place, Lamendola and Martin are optimistic about the imminent arrival of HD-capable gear.
New Videolines mobile truck deploys EVS servers for sports
Nov 14, 2008 9:58 AM
One of the onboard XT[2] servers features Multicam live slow-motion capability for ingest and playout plus a removable hard drive for storage and archiving.
The latest Videolines Mobile truck will feature two EVS four-channel HD XT[2] production servers. Located in West Jordan, UT, Videolines provides sports venues with a variety of video production services.
EVS said one of the XT[2] servers features Multicam LSM (live slow motion) for ingest and playout plus a removable hard drive for storage and archiving.
RIA, a reseller and systems integrator serving the Western United States, is helping Videolines build the new vehicle, which is due to debut for sporting events this fall.
![One of the onboard XT[2] servers features Multicam live slow-motion capability for ingest and playout plus a removable hard drive for storage and archiving.](http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/Videolines-200.jpg)