In Broadcast - October 2017 - Cover3

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 7 - Issue 10 | October 2017

InStudio

Covering All The Angles
The Open is one of the largest annual OB extravaganzas in the UK and CTV OB has been involved
with coverage of the event for over three decades...
Hamish Greig

By Hamish Greig, CTV OB Chief Technical Officer

TV OB has been involved with the
Open for more than 30 years,
providing production facilities to both
IMG and ESPN.
One of the biggest additions, in
fact, is a result of subtraction: for
more than a decade, the BBC and
ESPN produced the event side by side
because of creative differences on
golf coverage. The need for camera
positions to be doubled around the
course limited the ability to bring in
more specialty cameras. These were
supplied by BRF and ACS. ETP worldfeed production is being relied on by
both Sky Sports and NBC Sports, giving
ETP the ability to deploy more cameras
for the world feed.
Camera Feeds
CTV has around 175 cameras onsite,
99 of them for ETP. Sky Sports has 17
cameras; NBC Sports, approximately
40. At the core of the production
facilities is a broadcast centre that has
three main areas for the world feed:
a main production gallery; a main
submix; and a super-iso/replay room.
It also has a production area for NBC
Sports that includes a main production
gallery, iso/replay gallery, and main
audio-mix area.
The team in the super-iso room

is one of the most important in the
compound, ensuring that the main
production gallery never misses a
shot on a green and more via three
eight-channel EVS XT3 replay servers.
The super-iso team also keeps an eye
on the vast majority of the players on
the course so that the main production
gallery can zero in on those at the top
of the leader board.
Broadcast RF camera on the 1st Tee

The super-iso room has six pairs of
personnel, with each pair comprising
an EVS operator and an assistant
producer. Each pair handles three
holes and records all the green
cameras on three channels and then,
on the other channels, does a cut of
other shots. There is also a super-iso
director, who previews the replays and
then feeds them via two lines, X and Y,
into the main production gallery along

ETP gallery

with the three-hole coverage, marquee
group, and 1st-tee feeds.
All EVS channels also have eight
channels of stereo audio, captured by
tee mics, fairway mics, green mics,
and grandstand mics. This means no
matter which camera is chosen - it will
have eight channels of audio.
Next door to the super-iso/replay
area is the main replay-submix area
with two directors and four EVS
operators creating features and
additional replay packages via four
eight-channel EVS XT3 replay servers.
Between the two rooms, there will be
about 12 storylines going on, so the
main production team doesn't miss
anything, plus, there are another two
EVSs that takes in speciality cameras.
Partner Units
The compound is vast with CTV and
partner OB units to service the range
of productions and services. There is

The TV compound

EVS world in TOSCA

Colibri wirecam supplied by ACS

one unit reserved for the operations
for Aerial Camera Systems (ACS) and
its fleet of 20 speciality cameras,
including rail cameras, bunker
cameras, and the wire cam that runs
along hole 8 and the practice range.
This includes ten bunkercams, three
bridge cameras, two fixed beauty cams
in weatherised housing, five railcams,
Colibri Wirecam fitted with stabilised
GSS
Mount,
two
SMARThead3
beautycams fitted with Sony P1
cameras and Canon box lens, one
SMARThead in the Golf Channel studio.
A dedicated RF-camera cabin
onsite handles all the control and
transmission needs of 25 RF cameras
on the course (five systems are owned
and operated by CTV with a further
20 operated by Broadcast RF). An
RF-audio cabin handles 72 channels
of duplexed communications, 49 highpower radio mics, and 40 additional
wireless mics, as well as frequency
coordination.
Another key component of the
BRF operation is data switching -
through the use of our camera control
receivers from VideoSys they were
able to intelligently switch between
two transmisson sites for UHF camera
control data. They were only ever able
to use one transmit site before, but
this way we were able to ensure that
cameras weren't affected if we had to
bring a hoist down, for example.

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