Live From Super Bowl LI: CMSI Helps Ensure Fox Onsite Editing Facilities Stay in the Groove

The team handles color correction and facilitates content sharing with affiliates and others

Fox Sports has once again tapped the postproduction support team at Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI) to help oversee the technical postproduction facility outside NRG Stadium for Super Bowl LI.

“Everything is going very smoothly,” says CMSI founder/CEO Noah Gusdorff. “It’s more of a partnership rather than a vendor-client relationship where you get dictated to. And, of all the big events we’ve worked on, this one has been ridiculously smooth as we all learned from the last couple of big events. It’s pretty awesome the way it was executed.”

From left: CMSI’s Noah Gusdorff, Ruben Levins, Maurice Harwell, and Vance Piccin are onsite supporting the editing efforts of the Fox Sports team.

When the CMSI team of eight people arrived onsite, the edit facility was already cabled, allowing the team to focus on building out the editing and storage facilities as well as an ingest area and connectivity via Level 3 to Discovery Green Park, Minute Maid Park, and the convention center.

“We have seven Adobe Premier edit stations using Mac Pros with two of them also doubling as color correction with [Blackmagic Design’s] DaVinci,” says Gusdorff. “All of the suites also have [Adobe] After Effects, and one has [Autodesk] Flame.”

The edit suites share material on an Avid ISIS storage system that has 320 TB of storage and another 10-Gbps 90-TB shared-storage system. The edit suites are also connected to Fox editing teams in Los Angeles via Aspera and Signiant.

“We don’t want anything to fail,” Gusdorff points out, “so we have both systems.”

The team at NRG Stadium is focused on higher-level projects that might need the NFL to look over or other projects that are being overseen by the producers onsite in Houston. Helping in that process are ingest stations and a media-management file-transfer system, enabling content from specialty shoots and preshoots to be loaded in real time and then color-corrected overnight so that cutting can begin the next day. Content from the trucks also comes in via 10 Gbps in case editors need to access replays for a piece.

“We are also using Reach Engine from Levels Beyond to take all of the footage in and put low-resolution versions into the cloud,” Gusdorff explains. “Fox affiliates and others can see low-resolution versions and then order the high-resolution versions to be transferred to them.”