Live from the U.S. Open: CMSI is Post with the Most in Oakmont

Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI) is once again on hand at the U.S. Open to provide post-production support for Fox Sports, turning Game Creek Video’s Edit 2 unit into a beehive of activity during the U.S. Open. “Edit 2 has a lot of square footage and a huge engineering core so we were able to set up eight rooms of equipment in a day or two,” says Noah Gusdorff, CMSI, president. “Also under the desk in each edit room there are massive IO panels with a ton of Ethernet and fiber so we only need to run cable to the patch panel. This facility allows us to do a lot more.”

(left-to-right): Noah Gusdorff, President of CMSI; Ryan Werber, Network Engineer, CCIE; ad Brittany Sheetz, Post Production Engineer inside Edit 2, where CMSI’s team lived during the U.S. Open.

The CMSI team is working inside Game Creek Video’s Edit 2 unit, transforming the facility into a mini-post production boutique with an ingest area, four Adobe Premier edit suites, 256 TB of Avid ISIS storage, Cisco networking switches, archiving facilities, and a DaVinci Resolve color correction system.

A stroll through the truck begins with a media management area where storage cards are coming in from a variety of cameras, including the Sony F55, Sony A7, Alexa, and Red.

“We also have two ingest stations on the course that are connected to here via fiber,” says Gusdorff. “The cameraperson calls into the media management area and the team here logs into the ingest station, copies over the file, and tells the cameraperson when they can disconnect.”

That content, in turn, is stored on a 256 TB Avid ISIS system that is then tied into four Adobe Premier edit suites as well as the Fox broadcast center in Los Angeles. Fox Sports relies on Adobe Premier for road productions and Gusdorff says the ISIS system works well with all editing systems and is very predictable in terms of reliability.

“Under the truck is a Signiant kit that has a 300 Mbps line to Pico so that the the team there can edit a tease overnight and then send it back to us for the next morning,” says Gusdorff.

CMSI is also managing the Internet circuits in the compound for Fox Sports, making sure each group has what they need (and ordered). An engineer in Game Creek’s Pride B unit handles that via fully redundant Cisco gear.

“It’s fully redundant and been running very well so we’re pretty excited about that,” adds Gusdorff.

Game Creek’s Director of Technology Mike Francis says that Edit 2 was designed to have all of the infrastructure on an A unit minus and audio room and switcher.

“It has the full complement of master clock sync generators, image video for multiviewers and tallies, and and Evertz EQX video router and an audio router so it is designed to allow really quick deployment,” says Francis.

That quick deployment has made a big difference for Fox Sports and the team at CMSI. And with two final long days ahead the extra space and breathing room will no doubt come in handy.