FARGO, ND—WDAY-TV, the Forum Communications-owned ABC affiliate here, has adopted a sports production solution for high school game of the week segments based on the JVC GY-HC5000SPCU Connected Cam sports production and coaching camera to streamline operations and maintain coverage during the COVID 19 pandemic when social distancing measures have been necessary.
“We used to pull our production truck out and do a smaller remote for the game of the week, with three cameras,” said Forum Communications chief engineer David Johnson. “However, with COVID, we needed a one-camera solution that could do it all, including graphics. I asked around, and we received the same answer over and over, JVC.”
The station deployed the camera for high school football, basketball and hockey broadcasts and live streams during the school year. Together with the camera, WDAY-TV is using a Sportscast ScoreHub for transferring the scoreboard information directly into the camcorder for graphics overlay, the company said.
WDAY-TV is also using JVC’s BR-DE900 decoder to decode the camcorder’s native SRT stream. “We had one camera on-location and one announcer with a microphone or a headset, and that’s it,” said Johnson. “The GY-HC500 captures fantastic images, so it looked great. Everyone was very happy with the production value provided by the camera. The single camera operation was born out of necessity, but I think it’s something that we are going to continue.”
The GY-HC500SPCU is capable of professional quality coverage of sports events with score overlay and game clock. Scores can be input manually with a tablet or automatically from the facility’s scoreboard with seamless integration with ScoreHub. The camera produces high-res lower-third graphics and overlays them on video that can be recorded and streamed directly from the camera, the company said.
“We typically send footage back from the field and then stream it using SRT from the studio, but with the GY-HC500SPCU, we can stream SRT directly from the camera, so that’s really useful,” Johnson said. “I can see that being especially beneficial when there’s a breaking news story, and you want to just stream quickly and immediately.”
The broadcaster has used a variety of other JVC cameras for more than a decade. The station uses GY-HM750 and GY-HM790U cameras in its news studio and several GY-HM750s in its production truck. It plans to upgrade its trucks with GY-HC900s in the near future, the company said.
More information is available on the company’s website.
