ATHENS, GREECE
Fewer people. Fatter signals. More hours. Those six words summarize the impetus behind the big technical issues on the minds of NBC's engineering team in Athens.
Although the network's personnel footprint in Athens was roughly equal to Sydney, NBC promised the IOC to start reducing the on-site contingent at future Games. This drove the thinking behind NBC's technical strategy in Athens--a proxy generation, archive and MAM system--which allowed producers to view video from off-site.
BY PROXY
"Proxies are about how we're going to divide the IBC," said Matt Adams, director of technology, NBC Olympics, and the proxy system guru at NBC. "And proxies are also directly about how we are going to do HD, too."
Low-res proxy video is critical as the network moves toward its HD broadcast of the 2006 Torino Winter Games. With "fat" HD signals captured at acquisition, easily transferable and viewable "skinny" proxies become more important.
Doing more hours was an obvious motivator for the engineering department. In Athens, NBC and NBC cable entities delivered as much total programming--1,210 hours--as was produced at the last five Summer Games combined. This meant more of the smaller events needed to be covered, which prompted several innovations.
Edit-friendly low-res proxies were critical to NBC's Advanced Olympic Video Processing System, which consisted of 32 Sony MPEG IMX VTRs with eVTR card options at the ingest end of the system. These recorded feeds from the venues as high-res, 50 Mbps MPEG-2 files while concurrently creating MPEG-4 1.5 Mbps proxy files. These proxies were transferred to an Isilon server in MXF file wrappers via Gigabit Ethernet.
Cyradis software provided device control of all the router feeds to the VTRs, and also read OPIS data from NBC's database onto each tape's Sony Telefile memory label. In addition, it took metadata and proxies from the eVTRs and sent these to Blue Order's Media Archive software. Media Archive's keyframe extraction and shot-detection capabilities allowed users to search and retrieve assets using NBC's database resources. Both proxies and full-res files were then saved to a Sony SAIT PetaSite.
David Mazza, senior vice president of engineering for NBC Olympics, said proxy video will be the only way to meet the network's Olympics staffing and HD plans in 2006, and in 2008 from Beijing.
FEWER PEOPLE NEXT TIME
"We are committed to take far fewer people on-site moving forward, and the only way to do that is with proxies, which will allow people to have a monitor-quality signal for production from the U.S., with the user requesting the needed high-res files," Mazza said.
The development of a proxy system is about Torino too, Adams said.
"For us, using proxies is about HD in a very direct way," he said. "HD is coming, and in our opinion, the bigger the essence or high-res files are, the more important the proxies become because the HD files are harder to store and manage."
The use of proxy video goes beyond HD and split-staffing plans. Proxies are part of a multi-pronged strategy involving two more long-range issues--taming NBC Olympic's growing tape library and increasing workflow efficiency.
"We know we need to digitize our archive or we won't be able to find anything as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger," Mazza said. "And like everyone else, we'd like to carry around fewer tapes."
ALMOST INSTANT ACCESS
When NBC went home, the high-res tapes--thousands--were spread across several sites. Using traditional methods, a staffer trying to find material might request many tapes.
"Now, we have low-res to search with," Mazza said. "Right now, the low-res proxy points to a tape on the shelf, but we only have to go one more step to have it point to the actual high-res video on the PetaSite."
"We're actually doing part of that here. We're storing some high-res on PetaSite," said Mazza. "And eventually that will be an online process Éalready the Avids can push and retrieve things from the PetaSite in high-res."
As for workflow benefits, producers who learned to use the system had access to the material even before an ingest was complete. Those using the tape-based process might have waited as long as three hours for a tape, and often, more than one person needed the same tape at the same time.
Those who needed to look at ingested material were not forced to use the system. Rather, Adams called it a "huge feature enhancement."
"There's nothing they [PAs and ADs] couldn't do the old way," Adams said. "That being said, we're very pleased with our adoption rate. There isn't enough budget to train the people to get comfortable with it before the Games, there's no workflow training like at a regular plant. The biggest challenge is evangelizing."
The system was popular with several producers, many of whom did not know it existed until they arrived on-site. Jim Lucy, an associate producer and Olympic veteran, quickly became a system evangelist after noting it eliminated trips to the tape library and allowed the earliest access to footage.
"I love it," Lucy said. "I can produce more TV because it saves a lot of time."
Adams took the constructive comments of Lucy and others to heart.
"The directional plug-in is very young; it needs refinement because it was developed over such a short period," Adams said. "The producers were telling us what they wanted changed for next time, but the important thing is, they wanted these things fixed."
NBC is in discussions with Sony about developing HDCAM eVTRs for the 2006 Torino Games.
FILLING THE DAYPARTS
Although the proxy-based production and MAM helped in Athens from a workflow standpoint, its real benefits won't materialize until the 2006 or 2008 Olympics, when HD will be the production format, and more split production will occur. The other half of the Athens story is about the ground-level engineering achievements that helped NBC do so much more coverage with the same number of people.
"The biggest change on the venue side is that [we covered] all 28 sports, which we have never done before," Mazza said. "And the only way to do that without making our budget skyrocket was to utilize less equipment and fewer people, and use more of the host feed as we've been doing more and more of over the yearsÉ we needed so much tonnage to fill all these dayparts."
NBC did this using several coverage styles. A "C World" event, for example, had a flypack in a trailer, one or two cameras and tape machines, a switcher and an audio console.
"It's quite capable," Mazza said. "The small crew is a TD/Video, an audio person and a cameraman, and maybe an A2É and that's it for technical people."
These sites also typically had a producer/director, two talent and a statistician. C Worlds were top-level venues where NBC didn't have a truck; including indoor volleyball, track cycling, tennis, weightlifting and boxing.
"The U.S.A.-Greece soccer game was on USA Network live for two hours, coming from a two-camera C World," Mazza said. "We have a C2 for two cameras, a C1 and a C-plus subdesignation. Like many things we do, we design them for one thing and addother things."
Below C Worlds were D-level venues, or "Pure Worlds." These had no technical personnel on-site, just the two announcers and maybe a stats guy and a runner, using the host feed. These venues featured ISDN commentator boxes, but the producer stayed at the IBC.
"The producer is back at this end, and there's no audio guy riding the feed; the audio gets mixed later on, from a tape of the two announcers on track one and two. The producers simply set the level between the announcers," Mazza said.
REMOTE-CONTROL MICS
For these sites, an Australian company called TieLine provided remote-controlled ISDN codecs for the commentary boxes, which allowed NBC producers at IBC to remotely control the venue mic levels and the mix-minus, with talkback as well. (See "Connecting NBC and Athens," p. 18.)
Another simple, low-profile setup that saw a lot of use in Athens was OT (off-tube) events, such as sailing, table tennis, shooting and archery. For this, two commentators called what they saw on a monitor, with the producer in a room next to them. There was no need for a commentator transmission circuit. The crew included two announcers, a statistician and a producer. NBC did more of these than ever before in Athens.
"A" and "B" venues, such as gymnastics, athletics, swimming and so on had more traditional truck-based coverage schemes with multiple cameras and edit facilities on-site, but NBC's established "SWAT" truck concept got a money-saving makeover in Athens.
The SWAT truck once used to cover long one-day events, like road cycling and the triathlon, was replaced. "SWAT style" in Athens meant using whatever edit room was open.
"It's the same concept as the SWAT truck," Mazza said. "But we just eliminated the truck to save money."
A key enabling technology here was Scopus DSNG encoding and decoding.
"We shipped pictures all over the place with Scopus encoders and decoders--they allowed us to transmit four signals where we used to transmit only one from SNG trucksÉ their compression has gotten good enough to do that."
Getting it done was one thing; making it look good was another. On that score, NBC pulled some technical rabbits out of its hat to put a bit of glitter on what could have been pretty standard coverage.
One example was the "Digital Backpack," NBC's term for a Gigawave RF camera unit with a TotalRF control scheme on top of it, which allowed the tally, communication and camera paint to work from a distance.
At a lot of the Pure World venues, NBC had no technical crew, so Digital Backpacks were taken to sites that had talent, and an on-camera open was shot, sent via digital microwave to a receiver, and then back to the IBC on a V&A from the receive site.
"That stand-up would be played back at the top of the competition segment, and if it wasn't for the Digital Backpack, you never would have seen the announcer," Mazza said.
