Inside Game Creek Video’s Big Week as Ovation, Flagship Make NFL Debuts

This past weekend Game Creek Video did something it has never done in its history: have two new massive production trucks make their big-time NFL debut on the same weekend.

Ovation was fired up on Sunday for Fox Sports NFL coverage and then Flagship made its debut on Monday night for ESPNs MNF coverage.Whats amazing is that the team here in Hudson, NH, led by our Director of Technology Keith Martin and Integration Manager Matt Kane, have done all of the design and integration work, says Jason Taubman, Game Creek Video, SVP, Technology.

And watching it all come together over the last year has been amazing.

Were still full steam ahead on a couple of other projects so its tough to see the forest for the trees of what we did this weekend but theres a lot of pride in the team for having these systems pull off two of the largest weekly regular season NFL broadcasts with virtually zero drama.While Ovation made its broadcast debut this weekend Flagship did play a role in the NBA playoffs for ESPN in June.

But it wasnt until Monday night that its full fire power was on display.

Both Flagship and Ovation are part of an historic run of truck builds at Game Creek and Martin says the team isnt done yet.We have pushed 11 trailers out the door in the last 12 months with Ovation, Flagship and soon the Bird and Magic units are going out the door [for Amazon Prime], he says.

Weve been in truck build mode constantly.Completing so many builds in such an accelerated time frame is a result of two things: first, the ongoing maturing of technology like IP, the use of fiber, and overall stability in systems.

And then there is a philosophy at Game Creek Video whereby advances are done gradually rather than wholesale refreshes of design and layout.We have a platform that we dont mess around with too much and every move we make is a small tweak rather than a big change, adds Taubman.

We dont build the same truck time after time but there is a blueprint we follow so that we can maintain a 'platform' and maintain interoperability with our own fleet."While the goal may be to minimize big changes they do occasionally happen.

For example, both Flagship and Ovation have Riedel intercom systems, requests from both ESPN and Fox Sports designed to harmonize their intercom operations.Going to Riedel was a big left turn and when we actually got into it, we found efficiency on the engineering side because it just drops onto the 2110 network and integrates very nicely with the rest of the truck infrastructure, says Taubman.

Fox and ESPN use Riedel in their home facilites and they wanted to be able to easily trunk their intercoms to the team at their broadcast centers so they could hit one button there and be able to talk directly to the director in the truck.[caption id="attachment_287918" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Inside Ovation's A unit during Sunday's NFL game in Washington, DC.[/caption]Ovation is the big news this week and Martin says that, like Flagship, the A unit has a Grass Valley K-Frame SXP IP production switcher as well as Boland OLED UHD HDR monitoring throughout.

That switcher handles video signals captured with up to 40 Sony HDC-5500 cameras plus a full complement of hard and handheld Canon lenses including the ability to switch to shallow-depth-of-field mode via Sony Variable Neutral Density (VND) filter and Canon 122x Novel Look lenses.

Cobalt provides 384 paths of UDX with LUT conversion to ensure a consistent look across all HDR and SDR-native sources as well as an additional 24 paths for outbound transmission processing.

Leader provides LV5600 and LV7600 for all QC and shading waveform resources.[caption id="attachment_287921" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Ovation's A unit has two audio mixing areas featuring Calrec Argo Q consoles.[/caption]The core engineering area comprises 15 racks of engineering equipment in the A unit which Martin says also looks physically very similar to Encores A unit (Game Creek Videos first IP-based unit built in 2015 which has been replaced in Foxs line up with Ovation).

The A unit also includes video shading, a pair of audio mixing suites outfitted with Dual Calrec Argo Qs and a redundant Calrec Impulse Core processing and routing platform.[caption id="attachment_287920" align="alignnone" width="2560"] Ovation's B unit is very similar to Encore from a layout perspective.[/caption]Toward the back of the B-Unit is a large production gallery outfitted with 24 31.5-inch Boland OLED UHD HDR monitors and then in the front is a large sandbox area which will be used for graphics during the NFL season, explains Martin.

That space also has been tweaked so another technical director and production switcher surface can be added for NASCAR coverage as Ovation will handle NASCAR after the NFL season and Fox wants to utilize the sandbox as a second production space.As for the C unit, its heavily focused on replay operations for NFL coverage with 240 channels of EVS XT-VIA replay but it also has the flexibility to be used for nearly any production need.Leveraging Adders INFINTY KVM, we have the ability to move any PC resource or user workstation to any location within reach of a network switchport.

The Ovation production system is equipped with over 5000 switchports so we have no shortage of options, says Martin.Martin says Game Creek also opted to put the engineering core of that trailer right in the nose which offers optimal proximity to cooling as well as great access from both inside and outside the trailer.With the bi-fold door concept you can walk out the door and be right at the back of those racks of equipment and then there is also dedicated space and connectivity in the truck for equipment kits that Fox doesnt want to have live outside the truck," he adds.

"That really helps us streamline the interconnects between the trucks.[caption id="attachment_287922" align="alignnone" width="2560"] The use of IP and fiber transport is lessening the need for a rat's nest of cables running between trucks and venues.[/caption]Looking at the real-world set-up this past weekend at Northwest Stadium, home of the Washington Commanders in Washington, DC, Taubman is struck by what is becoming a trend in compounds when newer production trucks roll in: the lack of dozens of cables running between trucks, the venue, and around the compound.The next generation of our trucks have none of that mess as we push towards having a single fiber optic cable from the truck that connects to remote IPG kits that take all of the high-speed video and audio data signals from around the venue, says Taubman.

And then at some point we wont even need the IPG kits, and the fiber just connects directly to the building.

Were still in that evolution but this is a step in the right direction and something I am excited about when I look at Ovation and Flagship..

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