Intense detail: Bringing the NBA from Paris to the world with a collaboration between the NBA, ESPN and AMP Visual TV By Heather McLean Friday, January 24, 2025 - 12:14
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ESPN has been impressed by the AMP Visual TV team, pictured here on the NBA court in Paris, including project manager Florent DiMascio [fourth person from the left]
For ESPN's All-Access Paris coverage of the San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers matches, which took part on Thursday 23 January and coming next, Saturday 25 January, the US-based broadcaster has worked closely with AMP Visual TV to ensure everything goes smoothly.
AMP Visual TV is the technical services provider for the NBA host broadcast, which ESPN is working across as production partner. The NBA world feed and ESPN feed are being produced from AMP Visual TV's Millenium Signature 12 state-of-the-art OB truck. It is connected to ESPN's base in Bristol, Connecticut via Tata Communications' Layer 2 fibre connection.
AMP physically moved the switcher control desktop to the right, which is normally what we do in the States; that's how all of our OB trucks are built. So we had a Americanised control, which is fantastic. That's above and way beyond. That's why I'm giving total shout out to the AMP crew
The truck is utilising intercom, tally, media asset management technology, IP encoding and REMI control components which are used by ESPN on NBA broadcasts daily in the States, plus multiple JPEG 2000 transmission and return feeds to minimise latency.
The OB truck is also shared with the in-arena production, camera shading, and all press conference feed obligations teams.
Eddie Okuno, ESPN's senior remote production operations specialist, has been impressed both by AMP Visual TV's team and its OB. Speaking from Paris, he tells SVG Europe: It's a fantastic truck, and the AMP Visual TV people have been absolutely fantastic in helping us getting that all set up.
AMP Visual TV was chosen to be the technical production partner because its mobile unit, had the firepower, it had the technology, it had the core, and it had the strength to do the world feed show, our show, the inhouse arena, as well as the press conference, says Okuno. It had enough technology to be able to support all of that.
Inside AMP Visual TV's Millenium Signature 12 state-of-the-art OB truck, the wired player mic edit room
Above and beyond
He adds that AMP Visual TV went above and beyond for ESPN, by tailoring the truck especially for the American crew. He explains: One of the little quirky things that AMP did, which was fantastic, is in Europe, in a lot of the OB trucks here, the vision mixer in the control room is normally located in the middle of the control room because the director and the vision mixer is usually the same person.
Read more Basketball extravaganza: Bringing the NBA's San Antonio Spurs and Indiana Pacers to global viewers in ESPN's production of All-Access Paris
However, in America the vision mixer what we call technical director operates the vision mixer, the switcher, and then the director is the one who calls the cameras. So knowing that our American style of production was going to be in the control room, AMP physically moved the switcher control desktop to the right, which is normally what we do in the States; that's how all of our OB trucks are built. So we had a Americanised control, which is fantastic. That's above and way beyond. That's why I'm giving total shout out to the AMP crew.
The world feed audio room inside AMP Visual TV's Millenium Signature 12 OB truck
Intense detail
Planning for the two matches has taken two months of intense detail. On what was the hardest part of planning out this extravaganza, Okuno says: I think the hard part was the unknown; what you design and plan on paper is only on paper until you get on site. Until you get to site, start putting all the pieces together and realise what does work and what doesn't work, there are a certain amount of unknowns. We were very successful because we had hundreds of Zoom calls back and forth with the AMP Visual TV crew in preparation for this.
Read more Importing quality: ESPN on bringing the American gold standard of NBA production to France for All-Access Paris
There are a lot of things that get lost in translation or in workflow, because the OB truck that we are using is designed very differently than our OB trucks in the States. So I had plenty of conversations with my technical group that were coming to Paris; I had to say, guys, gals, we need to think differently; this is not our OB truck like in the States so we have to be open in how we're going to create our same workflows, because our directors and producers and production, they want the same feeling, the same mechanical skills; they don't want to think twice when they're covering the game.
He adds that for instance, Riedel is very prevalent in the AMP Visual TV OB truck being used, but Riedel is not very prevalent in many trucks in the US. So we had to make sure that we had our tech meetings, we went through everything. Intercom is very different in European versus American intercom. So we went through all of those details and that was really the key to our success; that really has prevented us from running into major, major problems. We've had little things here and there that all remote productions have, but we've been able to overcome them and we cleared all of our transmissions yesterday before the first game.
And really our timing is only off by milliseconds, which is acceptable coming from Paris all the way back to the United States. So it's so far, knock on wood!
