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MillimeterSuper Wireless HD
Mar 10, 2006 10:36 AM, Michael Goldman
This year’s Super Bowl XL in Detroit was not the first Super Bowl to be shot using an all-HD acquisition methodology, but it was the biggest and most sophisticated HD attempt so far. Mobile production company NEP Broadcasting of Pittsburgh handled the game’s on-site broadcast needs once again this year for ABC. According to George Hoover, NEP’s senior VP of engineering, the telecast’s on-location HD requirements were largely straightforward in the sense that HD production has become a lot more manageable in recent months.
For instance, NEP provided four HD production trucks and several support units to ABC on game day, and five more to its other client, NFL Films, which handled the international broadcast’s requirements and the production of NFL documentary material.
“One big difference between what we did this year and in the past is just the fact that we now have fully integrated HD equipment packages available,” Hoover says. “We can do 60 cameras, millions of replays, extensive graphics, instant editing, super slow-mo, all in full HD. That’s why, this year, we made only one show, not an [HD/SD] simulcast. We captured everything in full HD and delivered a center-cut 4:3 version back to the broadcast center, along with a [16:9] HD copy of it, and [the network] then broadcast one in HD and one as a standard-def signal. In the past, the idea was to simulcast because the HD equipment wasn’t fully integrated to do everything in full HD. That’s no longer the case.”
There was one important addition to the HD recipe at this year’s Super Bowl, however, and that was the seamless inclusion of roving, handheld, wireless HD cameras, used extensively for sideline reports.
“That’s the biggest evolution, the biggest change, in how we captured the game,” adds Hoover. “Wireless HD technology was the last piece of the puzzle to come together, and it’s now in a place where it can give us a viable product that is manageable during a live broadcast.”
For the sideline reports, the production hired Aerial Video Systems (AVS) of Burbank to marry an ultra-low (50-millisecond) delay LinkHD system (from Link Research Limited of the UK) to Grass Valley LDK 6000 cameras. AVS first tested the wireless system for ABC during a Monday Night Football telecast in late December, and results were good enough for the network to add the technology to this year’s Super Bowl telecast.
The system unites a lightweight Link L1403 HD transmitter with an LDK 6000 camera, and uses proprietary codecs from Link Research to compress, encode, and decode the signal as it travels through four strategically placed AVS fiber-optic antennas before being received by a Link L2132 HD decoder in an NEP truck.
Randy Hermes, president and CEO of AVS, says the only hitch during the Super Bowl was a result of frequency congestion at the Ford Field venue in Detroit, which briefly affected the camera control unit.
“We had some issues with that in the first quarter of the game with one of the cameras, while the other one worked fine the whole time,” Hermes says. “We basically went to an alternate frequency and increased output power, and worked it out quickly. Frequency congestion is a big issue at an event like that.”
At presstime, AVS was preparing to help TNT use the system for this month’s broadcast of the NBA All-Star Game.
(Learn more about HD wireless systems in an upcoming issue of Millimeter.)
