L2 Productions’ REMI Facility in Austin Can Produce Content From Anywhere

Music festivals, sports events are produced via flypacks and remote control rooms

The world of REMI productions continues to evolve, and the latest type of production to benefit is the music-festival circuit. Austin, TX-based L2 Productions recently wrapped up a REMI production for the Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival, as well as for other festivals and, of course, college and high school sports.

“Overall, Austin City Limits was one of the smoother festivals this year,” says Scott Rehling, founder/president, L2 Productions. “We’re sort of turning the paradigm around on how these things are done. For years, it was always trucks onsite at a central location and tunneling miles and miles of fiber over these big festival grounds to bring all the feeds back to the trucks to curate the live broadcast. That’s not what we’re doing.”

L2 Productions’ Scott Rehling inside the company’s REMI facility in Austin

Instead, he explains, basic flypacks with a Blackmagic switcher and audio mixing are deployed to each stage. Bitfire was the transport of choice for ACL because it provides Ethernet right up to the stage locations. There is also a host stage on the festival grounds where talent handles live interviews with artists and other guests and emcees the broadcast.

“The mix of Blackmagic and Sony cameras, shading, and switching is essentially at the stage,” Rehling says. “That cut gets used for the IMAG show and the big screens. But we take those line cuts with transmission tech, using Bitfire as the primary, LiveU or TVU as the backup, and even Starlink as a backup internet source. We transport those cuts to our facility here in Austin, where we curate the broadcasts with interstitial content, commercials, features, and live interviews.”

The use of flypacks backstage eliminates the need not only for production trucks but also for massive fiber runs from each stage to a compound that might be as far as a mile from each stage. Drones and specialty cameras on gimbals are increasingly a part of festival shows, and that is due in part to infrastructure-cost savings that can be turned into production enhancements.

“When we started doing this workflow two years ago,” says Rehling, “the clients realized that this model left additional budget available for those sorts of things, [which were] added to enhance the shows.”

With the core production team working from the production-control rooms in Austin day in and day out, the quality of the productions has also improved. “It’s a controlled environment with the same team working in these control rooms over and over again,” he explains. “You come in each day and flip a switch. There are no surprises or having to deal with festival grounds with 100-degree heat, dust, and all the other elements.”

Perhaps most important, the final signal transmission to the content streamer or distributor is much more stable and repeatable. “At a festival, that connection was always temporary and not perfectly reliable,” notes Rehling. “But here we have multiple gigabits of fiber that is load-balanced and properly managed. It’s just a hop from our studio to the client’s facility. For Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and ACLfest, Hulu was the distributor, and we used LTN as the primary transport from studio to Hulu, with Haivision SRT encoders as the backup.”

The flexibility of L2 Productions’ control rooms, he adds, allows the operation to scale up or down to best meet the size of the production.

The L2 facility can handle everything from large music festivals with multiple stages to college and high school sports.

“We can have two control rooms for, say, two high school games or then do one larger control room with multiple replay and graphics operators for a college football game,” Rehling says. “For some games, we can fly one person with a flypack and hire local camera operators. For larger games, we roll a small mobile unit carrying cameras, shading, audio, and networking, but it’s still a very small footprint and team onsite compared with a full production mobile unit onsite.”

A key goal is to bring more consistency and reliability to productions that have historically been the most budget-challenged, often the most susceptible to fluctuations and problems. “There are a lot of productions in the middle ground or that hang off bigger shows that this workflow is perfect for,” he points out. “It saves a lot of money, and it saves a lot of time.

“We’re starting to do work for organizations and even individual venues with permanent installations,” he continues. “They can just flip a switch, and we access a set of remotely controlled cameras, or they just need to bring in camera operators. We can receive the signals and do live streams for venues. And they can do a lot more volume of shows with this model.”