“SS16, 18, and 20 are sister trucks,” explains Michael Fernander, president/GM of NEP’s U.S. mobile units. “You could take a crew from one, put them in the next one, and they would feel like they’re in their own truck.”

When SS16 parked at Flushing Meadows, the CBS crew had an opportunity to take its time inspecting the truck, and the reviews were raves.

“They came through, saw it, and said it’s perfect,” says Mike Werteen, SVP of sales and client services for NEP. “They know that it’s going to fit in perfectly from an ergonomics standpoint, and we know technically that it’s going to fit in with what their needs are.”

SS16 is currently without a full-time client contract, but, after several days in the US Open truck compound, Werteen says he has already had requests from clients to make it their own. “It’s the most sought-after truck because it’s new and everybody wants it.”

Big Shows, Quick Setups
“Because of the engineering firepower that [CTO] George Hoover and his team have put into it and the infrastructure that they’ve put in there, SS16 has the ability to do the largest shows and also set up very quickly,” he says. “It’s something that our clients have talked about for a number of years now, and we’ve been able to effectively do it.”

SS16 uses the same design as SS18 and 20, featuring a virtual-monitor wall, Grass Valley switcher, Calrec Sigma with Bluefin audio console, and EVS XT[2] servers. The truck is capable of operating with or without a B unit, so, when it’s finished with its NFL duties on Sundays, it can handle a midweek NBA or NHL regional game.

“This type of a truck will be able to handle 12-15 camera shows eloquently and still be able to go do a four-camera college basketball game, set up in an hour, and be out of there in 11 hours,” Werteen explains. “That is not something that has historically been a significant portion of the NEP business, but it is now becoming just that.”

Integrated Integration
As part of his Supershooter responsibilities, Fernander oversees the U-PARC dedicated integration facility. All design, integration, and workmanship for all of NEP’s trucks takes place at U-PARC, located a five-minute drive from Pittsburgh headquarters, allowing the company complete oversight throughout all stages of construction on its mobile units.

“Once we take delivery of the trailer, they take care of every wire that goes in,” says Werteen. “It’s almost like building a house: we’re able to say I want these cable outlets here and those lights to go there.”

Says Fernander, “U-PARC is where all of the truck design is done. They are part of the process from beginning to end, so the wiring people are part of our staff. We often don’t think about things like where every light goes, but they do. It is a unique capability, to have them such a part of the process.”

As with any new product, Werteen and Fernander always expect to have a certain failure rate when they roll out a new truck, but, time and again, U-PARC integration proves them wrong.

“The failure rate for U-PARC is zero,” Werteen says. “Because SS16 is a new truck, once some of the new modules were put into the field for this show and used, they failed, but that’s just a piece of equipment. Once those were identified, there’s no searching for why a certain wire doesn’t work. Overseeing the workmanship from our corporate offices and making sure that it’s up to the quality that we expect is significant for us.

“The core organization of any truck company is going to be the engineers,” he continues. “When they see the pride taken in the workmanship of a truck, that is truly regarded and appreciated.”

“We also wanted to allow for integration, especially as we go to 3G,” says Steve Jenkins, managing director of NEP Visions. “The two trucks have a new expanding infrastructure, so the outer shell expands the trailer. That creates a much larger floor space, about 65 square meters per truck.”

That expanded floor space enables Gemini 1 to house two production areas, each outfitted with 90-input Grass Valley Kalypso production switchers. Each production area has three tiers and can seat 14 people, so at least 28 production staffers can be accommodated in Gemini 1 alone. The truck also features two audio areas, enabling two separate audio mixes to be produced out of it.

Gemini 2 completes the production pair with a full EVS area (which can accommodate up to 15 EVS servers), two additional edit stations, all the racks and engineering space required for a Premiership production, and a central apparatus area.

“A lot of the kit requires certain temperature control and is also quite noisy, so we’ve created a separate ‘fridge’ area,” Jenkins says. “This area of the truck is fully glass-fronted and stops the noise from spilling into the truck.”

Gemini 2 also features a 3-Gbps-capable Evertz router and embedded audio and is wired for up to 30 HD cameras. The truck can seat up to eight engineers or shaders, and the videotape-operator area is two-tiered. A position is also available for an assistant producer or tape operator.

“It’s light blue, and it’s quite a big beast,” Jenkins smiles. “We’ve also separated what would be a presentation [studio production] from the match. If you were doing a dual production or a match and a presentation, there is a smaller area within tape which allows you to feed directly to the second production if you wanted to.”

The two trucks can produce discrete shows simultaneously and together house 57 flat-screen monitors. Gemini 1 and 2 are easily interlinked by 10 Stratos multicore fibers.

“We seriously reduced the amount of cable between the two trucks,” Jenkins explains. “Everything is run over fiber. We now need only 10 fibers to interlink them, where normally it would have taken 100 cables.”

Gemini 1 and 2 are currently working on production of English Premier League soccer for Sky Sports, but NEP Visions works to ensure that the trucks are versatile enough to handle other projects, too.

“We do a lot of consultation with the key client to make sure that the space works well and also that we help future-proof the truck,” Jenkins explains. “We also need to engineer it so that it can be attached to other large sporting events as well.”

“CBS is attuned to the rhythm of breaking shifts a few hours earlier and making sure the water supplies are out there,” says Jamie Reynolds, VP of event production for ESPN. “The question is, how well can we create a depth chart at every position and keep people fresh. With temperatures like this, we get into a higher, faster frequency of rotation. But there are certainly plenty of people here on-site to make sure nobody gets spent.”

Instead of bringing a larger team to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to accommodate the more frequent shift changes, Reynolds is working the same workforce smarter. Instead of six-hour rotations, for example, the team might do four-hour pulls to get more-frequent breaks.

Although the nighttime hours might be long — tennis is frequently played past midnight at the US Open — fewer resources are required under the stars. At most, two courts are used during the evening session, rather than the five that are televised during the day.

“We have a second shift that comes in prioritized for the evening body of work, so you know that you’ve got fresh folks coming in,” Reynolds says. “We have the same kind of relief plan in place so that the night matches are optimized.”

A Constant Rotation
Besides heat-induced fatigue, Reynolds must fight time-induced fatigue among his team as well. Even for the most dedicated employees, 14 consecutive 12-plus-hour days can be a long time to spend packaging highlights, so Reynolds has devised a rotational system to ensure that his team does not burn out on a single task.

“We put everyone through a two- to three-day rotation, so that everybody touches a different station between highlights, tape producing, Orad graphics, and listening to press-conference sound,” he explains. “The theory there is, that will help them to understand how complicated this compound is. I’m going to teach them how to do something new, but they’ve also built an aptitude from what they did previously, so they may find a shortcut or a way to do it better. By the second week, I don’t want them asking how to connect the dots. I’m hoping I’ve bred a compound where they understand the connectivity in everything that we do.”

The operators train as they go, shadowing position leaders on their first two days and becoming position leaders by day three, before moving on to the next station. Finding the 150 bodies that ESPN needs to work every day from 11 a.m. until the final point, however, required some insider trading at Bristol, CT, headquarters.

“We have college football going on and NFL launching, so we get into a little bit of horse trading with personnel,” says Reynolds. “I will ask for a certain person because I know he loves tennis, and we’ll get him over to college football in time for week two.”

Phantom Goes Mobile
For its second year covering the US Open, ESPN decided to bring to tennis some of the technological advances the network has brought to other professional sports. New at Flushing Meadows this year are the Spidercam and FlyCam aerial camera systems, and a new type of high-speed Phantom Camera from Vision Research.

Typically, the Phantom Camera, which can shoot up to 1,000 frames per second, is used in a studio setting for glamour shots of athletes — the GQ shot, Reynolds calls it. The latest version of the camera, however, is portable, and the images can be ingested and rendered in the camera, instead of in the production truck.

“We’re actually taking it out on court, recording to P2 cards, coming back, ingesting, and using that content on quick turnaround, which is great,” Reynolds says. “That whole conversion process, the render time to turn 1,000 frames into eight seconds of footage, we’ve now got the functionality in the camera. We output to a P2, and we can have the footage within two minutes. That means we can go into a break with a Phantom shot of Roddick doing a fist pump. We’re pushing that on-court application of Phantom pretty aggressively.”

A New Home Truck
Not so aggressive, however, is ESPN’s use of all of the new features available in the network’s newest mobile-production unit, F&F Productions’ GTX 16 truck.

“The layout is very similar to what we used last year, but we have a [Grass Valley] Kayenne production switcher and a [Calrec] Apollo audio console,” Reynolds says. He notes that some of his folks have training time on the new gear, “but I don’t really know if we are exploiting all of the tools available to their fullest.”

The new truck gives ESPN plenty of opportunity and capability, but, without a better handle on how to troubleshoot if something goes wrong, Reynolds’ team will be playing it close to the vest for this first time out.

Six years ago, the integrated world feed drew mostly from just two of the show courts — Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium — and, between matches, showed only a wide shot with a “coming up” graphic. Then USTA officials decided to create an integrated show that broadcasters around the world could take. They wanted the show to look more like a network show that broadcasters are accustomed to seeing at tennis Grand Slams, and the World Integrated Feed was born.

Now it’s called USOptimum. “We decided it needed a sexier name,” explains Steve Gorsuch, director of broadcast operations for USTA. “For the second straight year, it’s going to a lot more places than we originally intended the show to go. A lot of broadcasters said, we don’t have time to take five court feeds and create our own show, so we’ll just use yours. And it’s worked really well.”

Recognized the World Over
USOptimum is being broadcast far more than Gorsuch had imagined: by 46 countries in Africa,15 countries in the Middle East,11 in Asia, and five in Oceania. That popularity is a direct result of the quality of the show.

“The goal is to show the best tennis that is happening on the grounds at all times,” explains Executive Producer Brian Williams. “We’re on the air from the first ball every day to the last ball every night. We choose an anchor match that we’re on each day, but we try not to miss any critical points on the show courts. If there’s a tie break on Court 11 and it’s 4-1 in our anchor match, we’ll bounce out there to catch that tie break and then get back into that anchor match.”

Williams’s hard-working staff remains on duty from first serve to last point, maneuvering viewers among the world feeds produced for each of the five televised courts (Arthur Ashe Stadium, Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Grandstand, Court 11, and Court 13). English commentary is provided for Ashe and Armstrong, but a host announcer and analyst are called on to call matches on 11, 13, and Grandstand if the USOptimum show chooses to put those courts on-air.

On the Fly (Pack)
USOptimum is produced from an office inside Arthur Ashe Stadium, with a flypack of equipment provided by All Mobile Video. The system is anchored by a Sony switcher and two Pesa routers, the Cheetah HD and DRS audio router. USOptimum also has access to two Chyron graphics engines and two EVS servers, which allow Williams’s team to showcase a great point on tape-delay if the team cannot get away from the anchor match in time to show it live.

“We try to do as much as possible live,” says Williams. “We either cover it live or record it and play it back when we can get away.”

Every year, the show adds more elements, from new cameras like jibs and the FlyCam, to a second EVS, to the title USOptimum graphic used to brand this year’s show.

“We’re constantly trying to add to our production facilities to make it a better show,” Williams says.

Eyes Everywhere
In total, USOptimum has access to 21 game cameras, in addition to a blimp camera, the overhead FlyCam system, and roof cameras for beauty shots.

“There’s really nothing on the grounds that we can’t see,” Williams points out. “We’re also recording everything from ESPN, Tennis Channel, and CBS, so we can work player interviews and personality shots into the broadcast as well.”

Between matches, USOptimum shows scores and key highlights of other matches and promotes what is coming up later. A rotating announce team ensures that a host is always available to provide English-language commentary behind the images.

“It’s much like what you would see on Tennis Channel, ESPN, or CBS,” Williams says, “but it’s for the world.”

And in greater numbers than ever, the world is appreciating it.

Initially, CBSSports.com College Network had planned to launch a CBSSports.com College Network-branded application, but along with Polar Mobile, the network decided instead to release college-branded applications with identical feature sets. In addition, each app would have customized branding for the school for which it was built. All of those applications would fall under the CBSSports.com College Network GameTracker title.

“A fan’s allegiance and loyalty lies in their school brand,” explains Jon Zifkin, director of business development for sports at Polar Mobile. “You will see high levels of engagement in the app when you have the school logo taking up real estate on the smartphone. Plus, schools are going to be more inclined to promote their own app than a CBS College Sports app, so we went from doing one app across Blackberry and Android to 190 apps.”

Using a list of 95 priority schools as identified by the CBSSports.com College Network, Polar Mobile has produced two apps for each school — one for Blackberry and one for Android. The feature set on each will be the same, which will allow Polar Mobile to synthesize its workload, but each app will feature content and branding specific to a single school.

“It’s not just the color scheme and the logo that change,” Zifkin says. “If you download the USC app, you’ll have specific USC content: scores, standings, and stats for each respective sport for each season.”

Each application will feature a sport ticker, which allows users to choose one sport at a time and then navigate across all information available for that sport. Sport-specific headline news and scoreboards will also be available, as will the ability to drill into scoreboards to access game previews, post-game recaps, and in-game statistics and leader data. Sport-specific team rosters and schedules will also be available.

Although Polar Mobile discussed the possibility of customizing the feature set of the application for each school, Zifkin argues that fans are not likely to switch their team allegiance based on the mobile features offered by their rival.

“In sports, it makes little difference whether or not you have different features from the next team,” Zifkin says. “If I’m a New York Rangers fan, I’m not going to go to the New Jersey Devils Website just because they have a really great feature. The platform approach that we have is very scalable, both for us and for all the schools. When we have new features coming into our platform, we can roll those features out to all 95 schools in one shot, as opposed to having to do 190 schools individually.”

Bigger and Taller
Once again this year, ESPN and CBS are sharing the most visible stage on the grounds, located near the fountains in the South Plaza. That stage, however, is 4 ft. larger this year than it was in 2009.

“They needed more depth for their jibs and everything else, so we made it 4 ft. deeper,” Gorsuch explains. “They also wanted to add monitors to the front. They wanted to make it more like a game-day atmosphere so people could gather and watch their feed, so we have monitors up front.”

Also in the South Plaza is a stage for Eurosport, located above a USTA merchandise store.

“The reason it’s so high is because we wanted to be selling stuff underneath the stage, but I would guess, next year, that would come down,” Gorsuch says. “They like the location because there are people here. They want to be immersive and want to be part of the action. People don’t like shots of just the Unisphere anymore because they say that is just wallpaper. They want to see people and have them see us.”

On-site for the first time is Sky Sports, which has a very large production, including its own mobile unit and a brand-new stage located above the practice courts closest to the West Gate. The stage will certainly be coveted by broadcasters next year since it provides views not only of Arthur Ashe Stadium but also of the practice courts where the seeded players warm up.

“I’ve had that in my pocket for years as what I thought would be a great location,” Gorsuch says. “Sky Sports actually surveyed a different location, and then the production team came back, saying they didn’t really like where they were, and I said I think I have one you’ll really like. I think now other people are going to make a pitch for that location, but, if Sky Sports comes back, it’s theirs.”

High Above It All
Russian broadcasters have taken over the space above Louis Armstrong Stadium that Tennis Channel used for its stage last year. Tennis Channel, in turn, moved to the southwest corner of Ashe Stadium and, 24 ft. off the ground, has a stage that is truly one of a kind.

“There was some space outside the kitchen of the player dining area, and, if you get up high enough, it has the Unisphere in the background,” Gorsuch explains. “A lot of the ground level is curtained off because there is support for the restaurant there, but we invented this thing. We built a stage 24 ft. above the ground, and we added a spiral staircase to get up to the top.”

Last year, Tennis Channel was located on the roof of Armstrong Stadium, where it was hard to get players to visit after their matches. The new set, however, is located just down the hall (and slightly above) the players’ locker room, so it is far easier to attract players for post-game interviews. The camera shot still has the Unisphere in the background but also includes the outer courts and people coming up and down the stairwell. The height of the stage, though, made its construction a chore.

“This stage required a lot of engineering for weight distribution because there had never been anything planned in this area,” Gorsuch says. “The other day, finally, we get here, and we were getting killed by the sun, so we went to a patio store and bought some umbrellas. They actually tie in and look great up there.”

Follow the Northern Lights
To create all five stages, Gorsuch contracted production company Northern Lights, which worked with CBS to create the network’s on-field stage for last year’s Super Bowl. Based in Wisconsin, Northern Lights creates broadcaster-friendly staging but was pushed to new heights — literally — to create the five stages scattered throughout the Tennis Center grounds.

Northern Lights arrived at the Tennis Center three weeks before the first ball was hit to begin building the five stages. Once the broadcasters arrived, they spent their first few days modifying those stages.

“There was a lot of last-minute scrambling, because you had stage designs and then broadcasters trying to figure out exactly what they’re going to do now that they have a stage,” says Gorsuch. “They had to decide how they wanted to rig it and how many cameras they were really going to have, so that has become a challenge.”

Getting power and fiber-optic cable to these out-of-the-way positions was no walk in the park, either.

“A lot of these stages are in places where we haven’t had stages before,” Gorsuch points out. “There was also a lot of on-site engineering done to be sure that the stages could support the weight they had to. Quite exhaustive engineering studies were done for each stage.”

His on-site engineering team provided the initial cabling from the broadcast compound to each stage. The final extensions are up to each broadcaster, as is the content they produce from each unique location.

…The latest and last expansion of Alabama’s Bry­ant- Denny Stadium has added room for 9,683 more fans at Alabama foot­ball games. It also has added more challenges to maintaining the grass field. Less sunlight on the turf is one problem. Less air circulation is another thing. The latter issue is one that more fans can fix. Four fans that will create an artificial breeze, that is. “We’re waiting delivery on some large fans, like you see on golf courses, for air movement,” said Scott Urbantke, Ala­bama’s director of athletic grounds. “We’re going to try that approach to create some wind for ourselves, to stimulate growth…”

…Boise State Athletic director Gene Bleymaier has unveiled plans for the expansion of Bronco Stadium, the building of a new football complex and Donna Larson Park. The project will cost the school more than $100 million. First addressed was the newly purchased property formerly home to East Junior High, newly named Donna Larsen Park. This will be home to Ed Jabcoby Track, which is currently circling the football field. Also located there will be places for track and field events and a multi-purpose field that can be used for Boise-area football games. Rows of bleachers will be placed on both sides of the track with a seating capacity of 2,500 each.

“I am absolutely delighted to welcome an executive of John’s caliber to the Calrec team at Bexel,” says Jim Wilmer, Director of Sales, Calrec. “As our business continues to grow in the U.S. and in the West Coast television production market in particular, John’s years of experience will be extremely beneficial.”

Prior to joining Bexel, Root was a Western Regional Sales Manager at Sony Broadcast and Business Solutions.

Root comes to Bexel with a deep background in the professional live event and broadcasting industries. He has held a number of key executive sales and business development positions in the last 20-plus years of his career.

Scott Nardelli, Chief Business Development Officer for Bexel, adds, “We are excited to have John, a seasoned professional with an extensive background in audio, broadcast and production equipment, join our team.  He will be another strong asset for our business development group, which is dedicated to bringing premier products to the market and delivering the ‘Bexel Experience.’”

A Los Angeles native, Root became one of the first employees at Guitar Center in San Francisco where he was directly involved in sales and services directly to the artists for the store; dealing with such artists as Santana, Jefferson Starship, Journey, Tower of Power, Huey Lewis & The News, and working with the famous Bill Graham Productions. His audio visual staging & rental experience started with AVHQ, the large audio visual rental company founded by his father in 1967. Root spent 14 years helping grow AVHQ before returning to professional audio as VP of Sales for Apogee Sound. He also held executive sales & business development posts with Jack Morton Worldwide and Caribiner Communications, both in Los Angeles.

Root resides in Culver City and has three daughters.

“I think this will really help viewers understand X’s and O’s, as well as technique and nuance,” explains Fred Gaudelli, producer of Sunday Night Football. “We can take any camera that we have and, in replay, turn the field black but maintain the yard markers, hash marks, lines, and numbers. We dial down the white on those lines so it’s more of a grey color, and now the players really jump off the screen because you have all this color over black.”

Illuminating Players and Viewers
The feature, called Sunday Night Vision, will not only help illuminate the players but help fans focus on the points made by SNF’s announce team.

“If we’re talking about a specific player,” Gaudelli says, “and we can show him and the guys that are trying to block him in full color over a field that’s black and looks like a chalkboard, that helps you focus in a way you normally can’t when you’re watching a regular replay.”

Sunday Night Vision can be used on isolated replays to highlight featured players, but it also helps to demystify the coach’s cam shot, a wide-angled view that includes all 22 players on the field.

“That shot is very hard to follow because your eye is not trained for it and it’s a very wide shot, but this tool also makes that shot easier to comprehend,” Gaudelli says. “I think it’s going to be a very useful tool and is something that hasn’t been done before.”

Almost Instant Blackout
Sunday Night Vision is powered by SportsMEDIA Technology, the company that provides NBC’s first-and-10 line. Gaudelli traveled to SportsMEDIA’s headquarters in the spring and was immediately impressed by the graphic look of the new feature.

“They were 90% there when I saw it, but they cleaned it up a little bit once they saw how interested I was in it,” he says. “It’s hard to explain, but when you see it, your eye just locks in. You become very focused on the players and what they’re doing. I don’t know how much we’re going to use it. We’re going to stick our toe in the water and see what happens.”

As with other graphics SportsMEDIA provides, Sunday Night Vision can be created almost instantaneously, but NBC was not able to practice with it much during the preseason. The network’s first preseason game was in Canton, OH, on a high school field that had too many extraneous lines on it to provide a clear picture. The network’s second preseason broadcast was in San Francisco, and the entire game was played in daylight, so there was no opportunity to practice with the software on-air in the environment in which it will be used during the season.

“We didn’t put it on the air, but Cris [Collinsworth] and I and the rest of our production team worked through it a little bit, and we really liked it,” Gaudelli says. “We didn’t really have an opportunity to practice with it on the air, but we took out clips from our games last year and practiced with it that way.”

Something for Everyone
Although the Sunday Night Vision feature may provide opportunities to go deep into the mechanics of the game of football, Gaudelli’s philosophy is to serve all fans, not just the diehards.

“My philosophy’s pretty simple: it’s to do what the moment calls for,” he says. “We try to remember that it’s a broad audience out there. There are a lot of people that are really into the X’s and O’s of football, and we want to service them, and then, there are others who are into the personalities and the stories, and we want to service them as well.”

Play-by-play announcer Al Michaels adds that it is important to call a Sunday Night Football game differently from a regional game.

“We have a big, broad, diverse national audience,” he explains. “You have a ton of people around the country who follow their team and don’t really know that much about the teams that are on Sunday Night Football in primetime. What we try to do here is to make this accessible to everybody and not turn it into a coach’s clinic.”

NBC will certainly go inside the game, Michaels says, but the production team tries to stay away from jargon that might turn off those fans who were not players themselves.

“When you talk about gap discipline, you’re losing 95% of your audience,” he says. “You can walk down the street, and, if you find two people out of 20 that know what gap discipline is, believe me, you’ve hit the over.”