Decentralized Production Tips and Best Practices, Part 1 from Sports Video Group

At-Home Production (REMI) using Cellular & the Public Internet Maintain Frame-accurate Genlock and Lip Sync across Multiple Handheld Cameras for Your Live Remote Production Ken Kerschbaumer (00:05): Hi everyone. And welcome to our first panel discussion of the day. Obviously our goal with this event is talking about remote production. But we want to take a little bit of a different angle to talk more about what life is like for people at home. And then recommendations for people who are working in new ways the last seven months. So it's great to be joined by Jim Jachetta, who is VidOvation CTO and cofounder. Jim, how are you? Jim Jachetta (00:24): Good. How are you, Ken? Thanks for having us. Ken Kerschbaumer (00:27): Glad to have you. And James Japhet from Hawk-Eye North America, managing director. How are you, James? James Japhet (00:32): I'm pretty well, Ken. Yourself? Ken Kerschbaumer (00:33): I'm doing all right. So we must start with James, you are in the Appalachians, I believe. Which I'm amazed you have even a wifi and connectivity down there. It's great. James Japhet (00:43): Yeah, it's a plus. Yeah, no, it's a welcome change from the city. So yeah, no complaints from my end. Ken Kerschbaumer (00:51): Yeah, sure. And I guess that gets to one of the key challenges we want to talk about today, which is, people are working from new places, right? And places where you maybe wouldn't think you would be able to do a video production. So from your standpoint, because I know Hawk-Eye, Josh was on the previous panel discussion discussing his working from home. So give us a sense of what the last seven months meant for Hawk-Eye. Because I know you guys have been key for a lot of the PGA golf events. What's it been like for you and your team as far as this new normal, if you will? James Japhet (01:20): Yeah. I mean, the first half it was very quiet and the second half has been pretty busy. It's been an interesting time. I mean, it actually threatened to tip just before COVID hit with the work we were doing with the PGA players, with their every shot live project. But it's been interesting. We've taken a very different approach to most with regards to remote production and the replay side of it, choosing to leave all of the high res actually on site and simply almost creating a portal into that. So yeah, we're very low bandwidth. As a solution which, as you say, even in the Appalachians I've got half a chance. Ken Kerschbaumer (02:04): Right, right, right. Well actually, I do want to start with the players. Because that was, without a doubt, I got to watch about what five hours, six hours of the cool every shot, every whole live. Give me a walk through it real quick, because your operators were based in the UK. So maybe that's a perfect example of this new workflow in terms of, how was that accomplished? How many people, is it 20, 18, 22 operators? How many were in UK? I'm quizzing you now. James Japhet (02:32): Yeah. Close. We had 28 actually. But yeah, effectively we had all our servers onsite in Florida capturing every single angle on the course. So 120 plus angles coming into the system. And effectively we are producing 25 concurrent streams, one for every group that was on the course. It actually crept up to 27 or 28 at one point, just because of a bit of slow play. But yeah, effectively we were curating a stream for [inaudible 00:03:04] groups. So cutting graphics, TrackMan integration for the PGA's nonlinear broadcasters around the globe. Ken Kerschbaumer (03:14): Yeah. It was amazing. It was really good. I wish we had the whole tournament obviously, because- James Japhet (03:19): So do we. We learned to model lessons on day one. Ken Kerschbaumer (03:22): Don't say anything, right? James Japhet (03:23): Well, I mean, we were very much looking forward to day two, come the end of day one. But yeah, we thought we were going to sneak in when the PGA hadn't called it off at the end of the day.But- Ken Kerschbaumer (03:36): I was gutted, at you like to say. Gutted, is that the expression? James Japhet (03:39): Yep, gutted. This is indeed the phrase. Yeah, very good. Ken Kerschbaumer (03:42): Right. So Jim, from your standpoint, what's the last seven months... You guys had some interesting golf also. I guess when golf [crosstalk 00:03:47]- Jim Jachetta (03:47): Yeah. Yeah. We thank God every day that we've been busy pretty consistently since COVID started. We are working maybe with different clients in different ways. We had done a couple of tournaments with the PGA, a tournament in the Caribbean, some other tournament's with them experimenting. Can we do at home production or a REMI production over an unmanaged network like cellular? And one of the big challenges in doing any kind of a REMI production at home. I'm sure James, it's important to him as well. Is maintaining Gen-Lock and audio lip sync. Bonded cellular was really meant for a single camera going to the courthouse steps to interview someone. Sometimes there was a camera operator, sometimes not. They'd put a tripod. The operator is their own camera person. Jim Jachetta (04:53): So really wasn't meant for multi-camera. So VidOvation, with our partner Haivision, we've fallen at this sweet spot now going on the better part of five years. Doing as many as 50 cameras, all maintaining a synchronous frame accurate Gen-Lock, audio lip sync. And it started with this crazy live TV show with Big Fish Entertainment. And even though it's a reality TV show, a lot of the workflow, a lot of the tech is like live sports. They dump all the raw video into an EVS. They play it back to the director. The director picks their shots. So there is up to a 15 minute delay in that production. And then with the PGA, they tried it out, had a couple of early events that were successful. And then in April, May, there was the first golf event that came back, the Skins event. Jim Jachetta (05:58): They did it at a private club where there was no fiber, the switch level three, no one had a connection into that venue. Only alternative maybe would have been satellite. So the PGA trusted us, we came in, we provided them the eight modem pro 380 bonded cellular. They mount on the camera, so the operators can move around. There are some systems that will do multi-channel, but they have to be tethered, there's cables. So they had two photogs in the T box, two photogs on the fairway, and then two on the green. And they kind of rotate as groups come through. Jim Jachetta (06:47): And then a big requirement is handling analog audio. Now some cameras have analog audio inputs on the camera, but if you're using a smaller camera, that's not necessarily the case. You're stuck with the internal microphones of the camera. I think of myself more of a video guy than an audio guy, but there is anywhere from four times to eight times more audio for every video. There's never enough audio channels. So each of our field encoders does four today, it's on the roadmap to do eight. I think customers would like 32 channels of audio. But we have a way around that. I learned about the top trace, to draw the red line. This may compete with you, James. But- James Japhet (07:48): No, no, no. You go right ahead. Jim Jachetta (07:49): We all know how Hawk-Eye has revolutionized tennis. If we only had it when McEnroe was around, there would have been less tantrums. But the top trace, tracing the ball. I didn't know this, that telemetry is actually sent to the graphical equipment back in master control via an audio channel. So having analog audio available on the camera made the top trace very viable. And then PGA, they have operators with parabolic mics getting distance shots, following the crowd. They had lapel microphones on the talent. There were commentators walking in the course with the players. And for audio only, they used the small pro 320. It has two modems. We just put them on their internal video test signal, ran it at a lower bit rate, and then use the analog audio inputs. So the commentator following the talent, his microphone will go into analog audio one. Jim Jachetta (09:04): Then he'd have a LOV receiver to one of the players he's near going into audio two. And then for diversity, there might be another LOV receiver on another camera, just in case cameras drift away. So you can have redundancy in your audio paths. And so in the case of PGA, there were seven or eight. No, there were nine camera feeds simultaneous, some tight, some wide. And then dozens of microphones open all at the same time. You can imagine the audio guy would go crazy. They tee off a bit, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, you get all this echo. And with a live show, you can't fix this in post. So you really have to have it frame accurate, perfect Gen-Lock. So that's really a piece that you need, is that frame accurate Gen-Lock. Ken Kerschbaumer (09:59): Right. Right, right. Yeah. So James, is that an issue? I mean, lip sync, as far as you're still, let's take the PGA, because you guys have been a part of almost every tournament, right? I think that happens. James Japhet (10:09): We have. Yep. So far yeah. Ken Kerschbaumer (10:11): Walk us through where you fit into those regular productions, if you will. And also, well the championships too, right? The Master. Sorry, not the Masters [crosstalk 00:10:20] Championship, the US Open. James Japhet (10:22): Masters is coming up next month. Yeah, we'll be a part of that as well. But yeah, I mean, just going back to the lip sync. We saw that as an issue, or a potential issue for us. So we actually, again, by leaving everything we had onsite and only offering a portal for the operator into those machines, we actually avoided that being a problem for us on the golf. But yeah, I mean the migration from every shot live to ...