NHRA Wraps Up Season; Eyes Remote Production, More Pitcams for 2024

NHRA’s final weekend of action is about to start at Auto Club Raceway in Pamona, CA, and it will be the end of an era in some ways as beginning next year the production team will embrace remote workflows as the director, producer, AD and EVS operators will be able to work out of a facility in Indianapolis.

“Our director Chris lives in Chicago so he will be able to drive down to Indianapolis and direct the show remotely,” says Rob Hedrick, NHRA’s senior director of production. “Game Creek’s been really good about getting us all the hardware set up, we’ve got a producer and 2 EVS Operators working there now, and we’ll test the full setup with Nitro in the off season. There will be a full monitor wall to support the director, and AD and occasionally producer. We’ve been using an AT&T MMC circuit, and I think the biggest latency we have seen is 68 ms which is nothing.”

That move builds on advances this season, including the move to fiber interconnects between the Nitro production trucks, RF Truck as well as increased wireless support from the pit areas.

Look for more pitcams to be in use for the 2024 NHRA season.

“Next year I’m hoping to add up to a half dozen wireless pit cams as we tested using three of them this year,” adds Hedrick. “I think that’s a really cool look because after every Top Fuel and Funny Car run the engine is completely taken apart and reassembled in the pit area before the next race. It’s one of the awesome things about this sport and now we’ll be able to look live into multiple pits. The evolution would be to eventually add that video to the OTT app so people can watch their favorite driver in the pits.”

This year the NHRA team also had a chance to play with Canon’s new 122x lens.

Canon’s new 122x lens was able to maintain autofocus in challenging situations from nearly a mile away.

“Josh Stoner, senior specialist from Canon, said the auto focus was great and I said, ‘can it handle 300 miles per hour?’ so we had the lens brought out to find out,” says Hedrick. “We put it on camera six which is past the sandtrap and about seven-tenths of a mile from the starting line.  It tracked the car the whole way and even when there was an accident it caught the wreck, was in focus the whole time, and then when the safety car drove in its racked focus over to the safety car. It looked like a person was operating the focus.”

A full-time Maverick 3 Pro drone run by our talented drone operator Tom was also a hit this past season and it was used for every event.

Drones provide a completely new look for NHRA coverage.

“It gave us an extra look over the starting line and over the finish line because it can look straight down from above,” adds Hedrick. “And it’s cool because you can see that not all the cars are pointed straight down the track as some want to be able to steer into the groove. And the drone has a cinema controller so it puts out a really nice 1080p picture that we can run through a frame sync and create really nice pictures and live scenics. In Charlotte they were able to send pictures back from more than two-and-a-half miles away.”

Another big switch this year is that SMT took over handling the graphic inserts and built on the virtual graphics they’ve been delivering since the Fox switch. “Our hope would be to advance our on-screen presentation with some added data integration for more advanced real-time metrics from the sport.”

Over the past few races NHRA has also begun doing live podcasts from most races.

“They’re getting some pretty good love,” says Hedrick. “We do them live on Saturday mornings and focus on whatever the storyline is and then have drivers, crew chiefs, and others join in. The live broadcast is on YouTube and Facebook and on OTT. Then I take the audio and put it on our podcast channel.”

The podcast is shot at the Nitro Stage with a few cameras.

“We don’t need a big set, just a couple of director’s chairs and two RF cameras that use 3G packs for the audio,” adds Hedrick. “The talent also gets an IFB feed so if we run any packages or video from an earlier race or an interview, they can hear the audio.”

That content is then recorded and prepped for distribution in the Game Creek Video Nitro truck that this year added a “ton” of frame syncs and also is now completely fiber based.

“Having a fiber-based compound is really nice,” says Hedrick. “That was a big improvement because we had a ton of copper last year and we’re doing 100 Gbps between the A and C unit, the latter of which is our support truck. The C unit also has all of our transmission hardware.”