PGA TOUR Enters New Era of 1080p HDR Production With New Trucks A fleet of nine NEP all-IP trucks will debut at Farmers Insurance Open By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Thursday, January 25, 2024 - 8:00 am
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This weekend marks the first major step in a new era of PGA TOUR golf production: nine state-of-the-art production trucks, built by NEP Group, will be onsite for CBS Sports, Golf Channel, and PGA TOUR LIVE for the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego. The trucks provide a consistent and stable production hub for PGA TOUR broadcast partners CBS/Paramount , NBC/Golf Channel/Peacock, and ESPN .
The fleet will serve as production hub for seven live shows: the network broadcast, four PGA TOUR Live streams on ESPN , SiriusXM PGA TOUR Radio, and two live streams for IMG Arena, the tour's official scoring-data distributor for betting operators.
The seeds of the new trucks were sown before the last media deals were finalized in March 2020, says Luis Goicouria, SVP, media, PGA TOUR. We discussed with everyone who was bidding on our rights that we wanted to manage the technology and TV compound and essentially collaborate on shared resources to create efficiencies.
With an eye toward the future, the tour and its media partners worked together on a solution that combines all technical resources into a singular fleet, allowing better sharing of resources - such as tee-box cameras or green-side microphones - while also equipping all broadcasts with the absolute latest in technology. In addition to serving as the technical core for production of the seven live shows, the fleet will house the PGA TOUR Rules Review team, which will work with Hawkeye replay systems.
This is the first time the PGA TOUR has worked directly with a vendor to build a custom fleet of golf-specific trucks for broadcasts in the continental U.S. and Canada. The fleet was built in collaboration with network partners CBS and NBC/Golf and, according to NEP, is the largest single event-production fleet in the world. It is IP-based (SMPTE 2110), offering greater redundancy and scalability than the traditional broadcast fleet: the IP scheme can carry multiple bidirectional signals on a single cable, whereas the coaxial cable used on traditional broadcast trucks carries a unidirectional signal per cable.
Another advantage is that all broadcasts can be produced in 1080p HDR or higher. CBS and NBC will be producing in 1080p HDR starting this year.
We had to create a truck that both CBS Sports Lead Golf Producer Sellers Shy and NBC Sports Lead Golf Producer Tommy Roy are happy with, says Goicouria.
Conversations also began with CBS Sports EVP, Operations and Engineering, Patty Power and NBC Sports Group EVP, Studio, Remote Operations and Production Planning, Ken Goss and their respective engineering and operations teams to make sure all needs were met, according to Michael Raimondo, VP, broadcast technology, PGA TOUR. Bi-weekly calls allowed everyone to get on the same page ahead of NEP's taking things to the design phase.
There was so much collaboration on that side of it, says Raimondo. Even on the technical side, we were all aligned with what we were doing from an IP perspective as well as on doing 1080p HDR. Communication was key.
The Farmers Insurance Open TV compound in San Diego features nine new NEP production trucks.
In the fleet, the Production Control Room unit houses the main production area; Field Acquisition Units 1 and 2, the EICs as well as fiber patching, video shading, the A1 area, submix, and majority of QC for audio. The Record Flex truck is home to EVS operations, editing, and rules review. Two BSI trailers comprise a main truck, which is now a double-wide, and a hauler providing up to 36 RF camera paths, the most ever according to Raimondo, and 240 radios.
And we have two office trailers, he adds, each with a back half where fiber is deployed. They will hopscotch from one tournament to the next so that one can be onsite the week prior and start laying out fiber. The middle section of those trailers is also where internet distribution occurs. Our last truck is an equipment hauler that provides all the ancillary tools to create the broadcast in the field.
Key technology on the trucks is provided by Animated Research Labs, AWS, Canon, Calrec, CDW, Chyron, Cisco, Cobalt, EVS, Grass Valley, RTS, Sony, Trackman, and TSL. The trucks can handle up to 72 cameras and have 120 microphones, 20 replay servers, 40 monitors, and nine wireless talent packs. NEP's involvement also gives the PGA TOUR access to the broadcast-services giant's TFC (Total Facility Control), which allows monitoring of all the equipment and interconnects.
If a fiber between trucks or on the course has a problem, says Raimondo, the EICs will know immediately.
Come Together The front bench in the PGA TOUR's new production unit, which has nine trailers
Dan Beard, senior director, remote media production facilities, PGA TOUR, notes that meeting the diverse demands of CBS, NBC, and ESPN posed one of the largest hurdles to overcome: We needed to create a unilateral working facility that everyone could still manage and produce seven live shows out of. There were a lot of intricacies so we had to combine a lot of blueprints, tear them apart, and start over until we got to a model that we felt everyone would be comfortable with.
He says that there has been a learning curve for some of the equipment operators ahead of the first event, Some gear, like production switchers, had to be updated. But the CBS and NBC engineering teams have pushed forward to make sure the result is a step forward for all involved.
[CBS and NBC] are on the front bench [for their networks], the talent still belongs to the networks, and what goes on-air is their cr
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PGA TOUR Enters New Era of 1080p HDR Production With New Trucks A fleet of nine NEP all-IP trucks will debut at Farmers Insurance Open By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
