Monday Night Football: Behind the Scenes

Feature: Page (3) of 8 - 12/03/04

Monday Night Football: Behind the Scenes The trucks, the crew, the drama of the largest prime time sports broadcast in the world

Thomson/Grass Valley HD XTenDD production switcher in HD4

Meanwhile, Esocoff and crew went about putting together the packages, bumps, segments and data that make Al Michaels and John Madden, the most popular sports announcers in the world, seem even more miraculously well-informed during the broadcast. For example, the opposing team?s (the St. Louis Rams) punter was making his NFL debut that night, and happened to be a Green Bay native. So the ABC crew found out where the player?s parents would be sitting in the stands and their names. Esocoff helped one of his camera operators find the location where they would be sitting, and a graphic map was created showing where the player had lived in Green Bay and its location as it related to Lambeau field. Later during the broadcast, as the punter trotted out onto the field for the first time, Michaels and Madden off-handedly mentioned that the punter grew up in Green Bay, and Esocoff was ready with a shot of the player?s parents in the stands along with a graphic map of where they lived. It?s this kind of pre-production that shows the extent to which ABC prepares for these Monday Night Football productions.

Click graphic for enlargement -- here are two of the production's six EVS controllers.

Heading toward the back of the truck, next is a control room where some of the instant replay equipment and its skilled operators ply their craft (see graphic above). The tool of choice here is EVS, a server-based HD record and playback system that has revolutionized instant replay for television productions. Working like an extremely high resolution TiVo, the EVS operators are able to record the output of any of the 25 cameras, and then place these clips on a timeline for instant playback. An intricate system of camera assignments is implemented on the production?s six EVS units by ABC?s producers, covering the entire spectrum of possibilities in the game. Brian Weiland, Engineer in Charge for the production, describes how it works. ?We have two EVS controllers in the main HD4 truck and three in another truck. All their inputs are routable, but they basically have set camera assignments. Associate producers direct the isos for whatever their spare inputs would be.? Playing back a single instant replay clip is child?s play for this invaluable instrument, which allows for much more complex sequences to be assembled nearly instantaneously. With EVS, it?s a simple matter to create a sequence of clips that show highlights of one particular player, for example.

In addition to the five EVS controllers, there is one EVS unit, called a Media Player, at the switcher in the main control room. Loaded with special software for the switcher, it has four outputs only. The controller is part of the EVS network, so operators in the tape room can build segments for this unit and then place those segments into one of its four channels for instant playback by the technical director at the switcher. The crew still hasn?t let go of the tape world, though. They still use a few DVCPro HD150 machines for instant replay alongside the EVS system. There are also two DigiBeta machines, to play back tapes that are brought into the truck. But the engineers are most fond of DVS. Joe Rainey, NMT?s Senior Project Engineer, told Digital Media Net, ?You can cue to any of your material instantaneously. It comes in handy when you have four days with ten hours a day of golf and you?ve got to get back to that first shot. We?re there. No wind time, no cue time.?

During the game, the challenge is communication, where the team of EVS operators and their producers notify the director and announcers of the availability of appropriate instant replay material over a Telex Adam intercom system with 136 ports, all of which are used. It?s an intricate, precise dance that happens almost instantaneously, with the director deciding when and where the playbacks take place, informed by crucial input from all involved. According to Monday Night Football video editor Vance Piccin, EVS offers an obvious advantage to the production. ?There?s nothing faster than EVS for those kinds of packages, because once they?re clipped, it?s just easy to drop them onto a timeline and then they can play them out and advance them live. There are a lot of advantages there.?

EVS offers additional benefits, as well. It?s able to save a copy of each clip, so that after the show is finished, the archiving of clips, called a ?melt,? is a much easier process. Engineer Joe Rainey explained, ?We use a product called the X-File from EVS that melts all the clips that all the operators select. It makes a backup of them on a drive. Pull that drive at the end of the show, then fly it back to New York, and that?s where they make the melt tapes. There?s no melt after the show. The melt is 80% done when we fade to black. 80% of the clips have already been transferred over because it?s doing it in the background automatically. A typical after-the-show melt takes hours sometimes. That?s all gone.?

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