OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla.,—When the USA Softball’s Girls 18 and under 2020 GOLD National Championships took place at the organization’s Hall of Fame Sports Complex in Oklahoma City, we had already produced the championship tournament for a few years and had gotten the process down to a science. Even with the burdens and unpredictability we all faced in 2020, using Blackmagic Design products gave us the flexibility and reliability to deliver a flawless production.
Since the Hall of Fame complex only has four fields, the tournament’s games were played at multiple locations across the Oklahoma City metropolitan area. We needed to be able to stream from multiple venues with consistent quality and COVID-19 restrictions limited the number of onsite personnel at each location.
NEW DALLAS CONTROL ROOM
Meeting these challenges required our team to leverage remote integration technologies to run the production from our new control room in Dallas, Texas. As we designed the control room, we leaned heavily on Blackmagic Design products to provide a full range of functionality within our IP broadcast center. With Blackmagic Design’s Smart Videohub 40x40 router in our control room, we live streamed more than 150 softball games from three different locations in the Oklahoma City area over the course of the six-day tournament to online viewers via USA Softball’s website.
The Smart Videohub 40x40 is such a central component within our overall workflow because it allows us to route our remote camera feeds to a variety of locations, which is critical to our live sports productions. First and foremost is sending our camera feeds to the ATEM Constellation 8K live production switcher that we use for switching all of our remote shows. Next is sending these same camera feeds to our replay system running on a Mac Pro with a Decklink Quad 2 capture and playback card which handles replay for all our sports broadcasts. Lastly, since we embed the location’s audio on two of our remote camera feeds, the Smart Videohub 40x40 allows us to route these feeds through a pair of Teranex Mini SDI to Audio de-embedders to send the audio feeds to our mixer.
Additionally, we use the Smart Videohub 40x40 to route our program output to multiple live stream encoders, as well as several HyperDeck Studio Mini broadcast decks for recording, a Blackmagic Audio Monitor for monitoring program audio, a SmartScope Duo for signal monitoring, and an iMac Pro to provide us with live capture-to-edit capability using an UltraSudio 4K Mini capture and playback device.
A COMPLETE ECOSYSTEM
As we’ve continued to expand and build out our remote production facility, Blackmagic Design’s complete ecosystem of routers, live production switchers, monitoring tools, cameras, and recording systems played a central role in allowing us to deliver affordable, higher-end productions under ever-shrinking client budget constraints.
In my view, Blackmagic Design is a leader in the broadcast world on two fronts: usability and the performance you get for the price. The Blackmagic Design ecosystem is well thought out and provides a robust feature set to meet the needs of virtually any production, including hitting it out of the park for our successful live stream of the 2020 GOLD National Championships.
Brett Casadonte is the President and Co-Founder of GlobeStream Media LLC, a live streaming and event a/v production company, as well as The Casadonte Group LLC, a creative services and video production agency. He can be reached at brett@globestreammedia.com. To learn more about GlobeStream Media LLC, visit http://www.globestreammedia.com.
For additional information, contact Blackmagic Design at 408-954-0500 or visit www.blackmagicdesign.com.
