Go Behind the Scenes with ESPN at SportsTechLA

At SVG’s SportsTechLA event,
hosted by UCLA, attendees will be treated to a first look at ESPN’s new
multimillion-dollar production facility. Built across the street from the Staples Center, the plant was built to
support 3-GB and 1080p/60 production and goes live in April. On
Jan. 20, three executives as the heart of the design and management team will
be on hand to discuss what the new facility will mean for the nation’s top
sports network.

“We have a lot of smart engineering and production folks
that have been working on this for four years,” explains Judi Cordray, general manager of the ESPN
Los Angeles Production
Center. “All the
technical geniuses back in Bristol
[CT] have been putting this production center together and building the
technology that we’re using in it.”

Those
technical geniuses include Jon Pannaman, senior director, technology, for the ESPN Los
Angeles Production Center, and Gary Reynolds, senior director,
production operations for the facility, who will join Cordray on the panel at
SportsTechLA.

“The
system we’re looking at is a combination of different technologies,” Pannaman
explains. “When all is in place, any editor in Bristol
or L.A. can
obviously see their own media but also what’s on the other site. That’s done on
browse-quality video, but they’ll be able to make a shot selection and drop it
on their timeline.”

When the
setup is complete, Pannaman explains, it will not matter whether the game was
recorded for ingest in Bristol or Los Angeles. Once an
editor has built a timeline, the full-quality media will be sent at high bitrate
to be incorporated into the finished piece.

“It
really is quite a seamless setup,” Pannaman says. “[The editors] really don’t
need to know where their source material is coming from.”

SportsTechLA
is a free event for all SVG Members. Click
here to register.