Live From Roland Garros: for the fifth year, it’s VER supporting The Tennis Channel
Tennis Channel Expands Hours of Coverage for its ‘Super Bowl’
– With more courts covered, Tennis Channel has expanded both televised and streamed offerings
“This is our Super Bowl,” says Bob Whyley, SVP Production/Executive Producer, Tennis Channel, of the network’s comprehensive and multiplatform coverage.“More is more … There are more courts available – so we’re taking more courts and putting it up on over the top.”
Tennis Channel has approximately 175 crew members onsite, working across the grounds as well as in a main production-control room, an asset-management area, six announce booths, and a main set on Place des Mousquetaires. The production facilities are provided by VER, for the fifth year running.
“They hit it out of the park this year,” Whyley says of VER’s efforts.
VER’s on-site custom installation has remained stable for five years: the technical approach has worked, and Tennis Channel is comfortable with it. VER provides two control rooms, with one used by Tennis Channel and the other by NBC. They feature identical layouts and similar gear, including Grass Valley Kayenne 5ME production switchers with 112 inputs and Calrec Artemis audio consoles with 64 faders. According to VER Systems Designer Bruno Brunelle, 18 EVS replay operators are working on 14 EVS IPDirector systems tied to 13 EVS XT3 servers in the machine room. Fiber, he says, also plays a key role: all the booths and the studio are connected via fiber. VER also provides an RF camera and mic that can be used to roam the Roland Garros grounds and send images to the broadcast facility.
“We used to have 21 EVS servers,” Brunelle notes, “but, with the channel count and EVS SpotBoxes, we were able to get that down to 13.”
Jay Deutsche, system and workflow design engineer for VER, maintains the MediaGrid server and says that EVS IPDirectors are used to shop around the network for content and also to continually send it to the editing team.
“All day long,” he says, “the team is loading drives, as the archive is here with us and it comes everywhere with the Tennis Channel. It’s a lot of drives, but it is a continual workflow, and it works as everyone gets in a rhythm.”
The system also gets heavy use: on Day 1 alone, six loggers created more than 5,000 log entries!
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If you enjoyed this excerpt, you may want to read the full article by Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director, Sports Video Group (SVG) fromTuesday, May 29, 2018 – 12:12 pm.
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