Live From the 151st Open Championship: MST Powers Broadcast Graphics for ETP, NBC, Sky Sports

An innovation this year combines output of NCAM stereoscopic camera with Toptracer data

This year marks the 25th anniversary for MST’s involvement with the Open Championship, and the company handles what is arguably a broadcaster’s most crucial task at a golf tournament: delivering the graphics and statistics that are often the most important part of the production.

MST’s Jeffrey Clark with the company’s main racks of equipment at the 151st Open Championship

Hired by European Tour Productions, MST provides the on-air graphics for the world feed, Sky Sports, NBC Sports, the Marquee Group channels, and Par Three Hole channel. That includes the scoring graphics that identify the golfer, the hole they are on, and the shot they are taking; the mini leaderboard, which keeps track of the top 24 golfers on the course; Toptracer visualizations; and the referee replay system, which allows the referee to call up any shot and review it.

“ETP, NBC, and Sky deliver the graphics packages to us,” says Jeffrey Clark, managing director, MST and Verso Live. “We just drive them after tweaking some things to fit our automations and integrations well. And our Verso Live platform, which is built on Unreal Engine, handles the constant mini leaderboards.”

MST’s team of 36 brings together scoring data from IMG Arena and SMT and pumps it through to graphics devices for the world feed and NBC Sports (both of which use Chyron Lyric X) and Sky Sports (Vizrt). That is when the dance begins: the MST team listens to the producers and directors to ensure that they deliver the scores and update the mini leaderboard for each production team at the right time.

“We all know golf is not covered in a linear fashion,” says Clark. “Our system can manipulate the data. Our staff listen to the directors and producers and organize the graphics to tell the story they want to tell. We don’t want to give away all the surprises that the producer and director are stacking up.”

The mini leaderboard becomes the most important piece of a golf broadcast during the closing holes, and MST built its own software a couple of years ago to manage the leaderboard more easily. The MST team needs a lot of control over that board, and the custom software allows the MST teams to hold scores back so that they are in sync with production. It also is designed to be super easy to operate.

“We hire people who are experts in the sport, so the software is dead easy for them to use,” adds Clark. “They press a button, and it gives them what they want on screen.”

MST continues to evolve its offerings, Key to its own internal software development is the use of the Unreal Engine, the graphics powerhouse that has transformed the industry.

“Unreal Engine is without a doubt the future,” says Clark. “We use Unreal Engine 5, [which] allows you to be that master of your own destiny. There are no license restraints or hardware restraints holding you back; it’s really up to your creativity.”

For MST, that creativity has resulted in a new company: Verso Live. In 2020, the company won an Epic Mega grant to create its own CG.

“It allows the operators to press one button and do the normal graphics, ticker, and lower-thirds,” Clark explains. “They hit another button and can do a full 3D environment where the camera flies through the scene in real time. It looks brilliant and is done at a fraction of the cost; it runs on consumer hardware.”

One advance this year is the result of a partnership between MST, Virtual Eye, and Toptracer to push shot tracking to a new level. On the 1st and 17th holes, an NCAM stereoscopic camera is mounted atop the regular broadcast camera. The NCAM output is sent to Virtual Eye, which visualizes the hole in 3D and combines it with Toptracer data. Trialed at a tournament in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, it was deployed for the first time at last week’s Scottish Open before making the leap to the 151st Open Championship.

“We used the new Hunter sensor from Toptracer, which is massive and captures the arc more accurately,” says Clark. “When you combine the tracking data from NCAM with the visualization of a more accurate radar, you can do graphics with the real trace on real pictures in real time.”

The team continues to refine that system now that the concept has found success, Clark says. With a little luck, it will be seen at some of the other events the company works on: MST has a presence at the Ryder Cup, all European Tour Production events, the South Sunshine Tour, the Asian Tour, and even basketball games.