PSX5Central
Non Gaming Discussions => Off-Topic => Topic started by: videoholic on May 31, 2004, 07:04:46 PM
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"This is the world\'s largest TiVo for the world\'s largest sports fan!"
A story from Broadcasting & Cable updating the ESPN HD plans:
Razzle Dazzle - New ESPN digital center scores with HD
By Ken Kerschbaumer -- Broadcasting & Cable, 5/31/2004
ESPN redefined sports TV. And June 7, it makes history. Again. That\'s when it begins broadcasting 13 hours of SportsCenter daily in HDTV. And it comes courtesy of a new set that promises to dazzle audiences.
How dazzling?
ESPN enlisted the help of Disney\'s Imagineering, and it didn\'t disappoint. The set incorporates 5,000 fiber-optic lights in the floor and flashes them in sync with new SportsCenter theme music. ESPN hopes it will do for HDTV what Bonanza did for color TV: give people a reason to buy HD sets. It will also improve the viewing experience for standard-definition viewers.
Flash aside, the real story is behind the scenes.
SportsCenter will be the first program to broadcast from ESPN\'s new 120,000-square-foot digital facility—a state-of-the-art plant that is arguably the most advanced in the world.
"All our entities will access video, audio, and interviews instantaneously," explains ESPN and ABC Sports President George Bodenheimer.
It took 18 months of planning once HDTV entered the equation, but the results are worth it. "I can\'t imagine making a change that\'s bigger than this," says Ted Szypulski, director of ESPN engineering special projects. "It\'s HD, it has surround sound, it\'s tapeless, it has nonlinear editing. This is huge for us."
The main SportsCenter studio offers more than just bells and whistles. Thirteen Barco HD RPs and 11 LCD panels provide sizzle and can be controlled with the push of a button.
Adding extra spice to the broadcasts are three "privacy-glass" panels located behind the anchors. They can instantly turn opaque, making them suitable as a backdrop for over-the-shoulder graphics and animations.
There are three separate pairs of panels, each with its own video channel, providing maximum flexibility for the graphics and animations created with VizRT software.
At the heart of the facility sits 72 TB of Quantel generationQ video servers, enough to store more than 4,000 hours of content, and a 100-Gbps network tying all the editing, graphics, and newsroom computers together. "This is the world\'s largest TiVo for the world\'s largest sports fan," says Chuck Pagano, senior vice president of technology, engineering, and operations.
When the facility is fully functional this fall, sports events will be ingested into the servers, complete with metadata: team names, dates, times, and rosters. Once the games are on the server, the fun begins.
With the new system, tape decks will be replaced by 68 workstations, each with a flat-screen TV and two computers. One computer is tied into the Colledia system, where editors can enter game information tagged to the video file. The other is for e-mail or Internet service.
Production assistants (PAs) sit at the stations and assemble highlights that tell the story of the game. Aiding in that task will be SportsTicker, an ESPN-owned company based in New Jersey that supplies metadata, like pitch counts for baseball or down-and-yardage-to-go info for football.
That frees the PAs to focus on adding color information, such as "Jeter smiles" or "fans mocking Kobe," giving depth to the metadata library.
Szypulski says the information resembles Post-It notes. Once annotations are in the system, editors in the 19 edit rooms (seven with Quantel eQ editors and 12 with Quantel qEdit Pro systems) can add interstitials, sound effects, and graphics to the video. "They\'ll have pointers to a clip so that editors can look at the descriptions and jump to those points immediately," he explains. "Then they can decide if they want to put it into the highlight package."
ESPN hopes this type of time saving will trounce the competition. Sports coverage is about immediacy, which is what the system delivers.
"With the Quantel system, we can ingest, annotate, edit, and air the same media at the same time," says Szypulski. "You can\'t do that with videotape."
Another boon to using the Quantel editing system: ESPN can air a play before it\'s completed. For example, MLB has granted ESPN the right to air home runs while the game is in progress. If the assistant watching the game knows that Barry Bonds just hit a "no-doubt-about-it" home run, he or she can cue the producer. And the producer can begin airing the at-bat before Bonds even crosses home plate.
The facility will have a number of control rooms, including four production-control rooms, 10 master-control rooms (long-range plans call for moving a number of ESPN\'s networks into the new facility), and three integration-control rooms. The ICRs are a combination of a master- and production-control room, useful for remote events that need commercials inserted.
For now, this vast effort, known as the Digital Conversion project, is still in the build-out stages. Next Monday, the new SportsCenter studio and production-control room will be lit, but the rest of the facility remains in preseason. Employees are still running through the playbook.
One thing is clear: The bar for studio facilities has been raised.
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I dislike Stuart Scott. Um...other than that...
The last I checked, HD just expanded the viewing area. As much as I want to see another 2 feet of the Sportscenter Fasaad (sp?), meh.
That, and I\'m poor. Give me money, and I will buy an HD set.
See Yuz.
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"Another boon to using the Quantel editing system: ESPN can air a play before it\'s completed. For example, MLB has granted ESPN the right to air home runs while the game is in progress. If the assistant watching the game knows that Barry Bonds just hit a "no-doubt-about-it" home run, he or she can cue the producer. And the producer can begin airing the at-bat before Bonds even crosses home plate."
This is pretty sweet.
Having a tapeless system is freaking huge with the immediacy of sports. Although if they don\'t have the rights for the games, like during a football game, it doesn\'t really matter. They can\'t air a play till the credits finish anyway.
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New theme music...bah it better be good. Everyone loves the theme music how it is now anyway.
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I don\'t hink they are changing their music. Maybe updating it, but not changing it. That would be pretty stupid.
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Probably add some hip hop flavor to it, David Hasselhoff style.
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I like this. Now that baseball is into full swing and the NFL season around the corner.
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dada da, dada da
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At the heart of the facility sits 72 TB of Quantel generationQ video servers, enough to store more than 4,000 hours of content, and a 100-Gbps network tying all the editing, graphics, and newsroom computers together.
Geez the nerd in me would like to be in that room and hear all those servers hum.
Adding another geewiz factoid, Matrix 3 took over 100TB of server space and it\'s only an hour and a half long :eek:
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Just wanted to remind you guys that the first show on the new set airs tonight at 11pm EST.
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Here\'s a pic.
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Does Sportscenter no longer come on regular ESPN? That shit wasn\'t on all morning. My TV is on Sportscenter when I wake up until when I leave and it was on poker(?).
As a matter of fact Around the Horn and PTI were bumped to ESPN2 yesterday, because of poker.