With Broadcast Pix, Ole Miss Gets Two Productions in One

By Carolyn Braff

The University of Mississippi was one of Broadcast Pix’s first clients, having relied on the Studio 2000 switcher for six years. So, when the company came out with a 2-M/E version of its Slate production switcher, Ole Miss was understandably one of the first in line for the upgrade. Aside from new HD capability and an improved feature set, the new switcher allows the university to create two shows at once — in each of three venues.

“When we got our new $6 million high-definition Daktronics video board in the football stadium, we were looking at increasing the production value for our video content,” explains Shane Sanford, director of Internet services and graphic design for Ole Miss Sports Productions. “We also sell our ballgames to our fan base, as well as archive all our content for videos that we produce after the fact, so we were looking to increase our production value for all of those outlets.”

The Broadcast Pix Slate 5032hh 2-M/E HD integrated live-production system includes CG, DVE, still and clip storage, camera control, monitoring, a router, and 16:9 HD capability and will be used to produce both game-day content and feature videos at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for football, Tad Smith Coliseum for basketball, and Oxford-University Stadium for baseball.

Ole Miss’s control room is located in the Athletics Administration Building, geographically in the middle of the three venues to which it is connected. A two-way fiber network allows Sanford’s team to patch into all three to produce game-day content from a single location, and the 2-M/E Link on the switcher allows two different shows to be produced simultaneously.

“That 2 Link basically marries the M/Es together when you want it to, so that’s what allows us to do two shows at the same time,” Sanford explains. “That way, you’re not having to mouse back and forth between the 2 M/Es, making the exact same moves. We can have a video-board show running on one of the M/Es with static graphics running during the timeouts, and, on the other M/E, we can run full commercial breaks and have it sold for a television broadcast.”

Aside from the in-game entertainment, the second show that Sanford’s team produces can be sent to any number of outlets, including Web streams, skybox content, and broadcast TV. This feature is especially useful during baseball broadcasts, since NCAA rules do not permit live video to run while a batter is in the box. Rather than subjecting Internet or TV viewers to a static headshot as a batter takes his stance, on the second M/E, Sanford’s team can incorporate live video and replays, making for a much more entertaining show.

“We are looking at doing some Tuesday-night baseball broadcasts this spring,” Sanford explains. “We would send one of the M/Es to the video boards with our full four-camera production and replays, and then, during timeouts where they’re doing promotions on the field, we would take a minute-and-a-half commercial break, so the two shows can run concurrently.”

The first edition of the Broadcast Pix switcher that Ole Miss purchased, the Studio 2000, allowed the game-day crew to turn two positions into one, combining the graphics operator with the server operator. This latest upgrade allows Sanford’s team to eliminate a third position, a dedicated stats operator.

“There’s a secondary program that comes with this switcher, called CG Connect,” Sanford explains. “It connects through the Inscriber and will read an XML file, which is what our stats program spits out for player and game data. We wrote a supplementary program so that the system can condense the XML down to the elements that we want. Now all we have to do is pull up the batter’s headshot and all of his statistical information is already there. It’s made the workflow a whole lot better.”

For Ole Miss Sports Productions’ full-time crew of three — with an additional seven to 10 freelancers — a better workflow means a far more streamlined operation.

The new HD switcher can enable all content going through it to go HD, but, since Ole Miss had been working with the SD 2000 model for so long, its cards cannot currently handle HD content aside from camera feeds.

“The cameras are straight-patched through, and everything else is upconverted through their software,” Sanford says. “Hopefully, this fall, we will be upgrading to their G series, which will handle HD clips.”

Still, Ole Miss’s hardworking Studio 2000 switcher isn’t destined for the scrap heap: the unit will move to a smaller control room to produce softball games and serve as a backup to the new 5032hh.