This series on Live Sports Production is all about the technology of sports production and the engineering decisions required to make it all work. Before we dig into some of the technical detail of how production happens in future articles, here we take a step back and look at the gallery creative team, their workflow and how that shapes the technology of the gallery and the modern production suite.

We asked all of the engineering team panellists for this series the same simple question: Has much changed in terms of the creative team, the tools they require, the layout of the gallery and the technology required to support them? It turned out to be pretty much the only question that made them stop, scratch their heads for a minute and say: “No. Not really.” Followed fairly quickly by “We actually work quite hard to keep things very familiar for the creative people.” From a creative perspective this is of course not completely true, plenty has changed in terms of the operational details of the software and the tools the creative teams use, but the response is actually what we expected to hear, because we were talking to the engineering teams.

Dan Turk. CTO, NEP Americas sums it up pretty well. “The technology changes we make should not affect the front bench. They need to do their job. They need to be creative, and be in the right frame of mind to produce their show. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s a coax or a fiber cable.”

As we will see in a subsequent article on Broadcast Controllers, there is one key technology driven operational change for the creative teams:

Dan Turk. again “It has changed on the technical side though. Instead of relying on an engineer to have to do everything, through control systems we’re able to give the lead operators smart panels that are custom-built so they can do things themselves. It’s a touch screen, and it is easy. We try to make it fun with graphics. Instead of needing to call back to audio to change a route into an audio monitoring device, they can click on a picture, it pops up, they select the button they want and click on the source they want. Using the control system to empower the operators who want to do things themselves and not have to rely on engineering for those things, frees up the engineering staff to deal with issues and monitor the health across the whole system.”

In context of a series looking at the engineering behind the gallery, it seems wise to at least run through what the gallery consists of, and a little of its history – so we thought it would be fun to interview one of our own team, Broadcast Bridge Director Of Client Services, Norman Rouse, who started in gallery production in 1984, served his time in production and went on to hold product management roles with a number of leading vendors, including Quantel & Sony.

“When I first started we were taught this Acronym that was drummed into us that is all about STUDIO’s, but it applies to being in OB’s as well.

S was set up time - never, ever, ever, ever underestimate that because it will always take longer. Even if everybody comes in and says, “oh yeah, I’ve worked in this gallery before” because there will be something that has changed, or been updated, or whatever else it might be.

T is about talent. Your technical talent. Make sure they’re loved and adored, and there’s a coffee machine close at hand, because people have walked off for less.

U is unity. We’re one. Our purpose is to deliver the best sports output, or whatever it is that you’re making, and you being the Autocue operator doesn’t mean that you’re less important than the visual mixer, because there’s an emotional hierarchy in production. The closer you’re sitting to the Director, the more important you are. That isn’t in fact the case at all. But people who are new into the industry have that perception.

D is the Director. The the head of everything. That person has to walk this amazing balancing line between directing everybody to physically do things, but letting everybody have their say to add value to the output. It’s quite a unique skill. They’re sometimes brilliant when they’re in the gallery and then a total nightmare outside of the gallery. It’s that amazing sort of personality. Good vision mixers often try to step up to become a director and most of them fail, which is sort of quite interesting.

I is innovation. Do not innovate unless you are going to make something better. Of course this is aimed at manufacturers. Never innovate unless it’s going to add some absolute value to what you’re doing.

O is obstacles. Have a mindset which says things are going to be going wrong, and it’s simply a case of pulling together to make sure that all deliverables go out.”

Gallery Layout

Norman talks us through the gallery layout and the shape of the team based on his own decades of experience and recent conversations with friends in the industry.

“Things aren’t laid out in one long line but it helps to describe the team by visualizing left to right. You might have between 5 and 20 people depending on the size of the show with some of the functions doubling up to provide additional capacity to handle more cameras or multiple output feeds on larger productions.”

“On the left you have the Executive Producer (EP), the person spending the money. Close by is the Producer, who is the person making sure the show is done to the standards required by the company… and near to the Producer is the Director, who is trying to visualize what that Producer wants. Every so often you can have a bit of a ding dong between the Producer and the Director, but nine times out of ten those two people tend to have been working together on the same type of show for quite a bit of time, so they know each other inside out and back to front. The difficulty comes when you’ve got a big event, an Olympic Games, a World Cup or whatever, where a production company is chosen to oversee everything. Then you might have a mix of Producer and Director who have to learn very quickly how to get along with each other. This group is on the left, close enough to see what’s going on, but not close enough to press any buttons as they always used to be described to me.”

“Then you have the Production Assistant (PA), although they’re not called this now, they’re called Script Supervisors. The name comes from Autocue systems, because most timing for many shows is linked to the script systems and the PA is responsible for all of that. They watch the running order script, which has already been made before the show starts, and if people are veering off that – they are responsible for reminding everybody what the running order, which has been agreed with management of course, says. A good PA will make your program or break your program and they are super valuable.”

“The PA, the Director and the Vision Mixer are usually grouped together. The Vision Mixer is responsible for executing the actions called for by the Director. They’re also sat together so that they have the best view of the monitor wall in front of them. Particularly on live events, underneath the Preview and the Program monitor, you have 5 or 6 monitors where pre-selected items are being fed up to them. They’re in the eye line of the PA, the Director and the Vision Mixer, so they can be looking at that next thing which might be happening before it becomes a preview.”

“To the right of the Vision Mixer on almost every show today is some sort of slow-motion operator – sometimes called an EVS Operator or the Package Operator, because they don’t only do slow motion in sports events, they cut little clips together very quickly and then deliver them up to that row of monitors underneath the Preview and the Program monitors. Although there are often two or three replay seats, one of them might be servicing the vision mixer, whilst others may well be doing packages. Most productions don’t need more than eight channels of replay. In very old parlance they might have also been referred to as the Grams Operator because they would also be responsible for playing in sound effects or music beds.”

“With sports production this is one area of technology which has changed quite dramatically through the decades. I remember at Sony we built a slow-motion replay truck which had, I kid you not, 26 slow motion replay positions. A big event like a class one Premier League football match uses between 26 and 30 cameras today and the biggest matches back then did too.”

“Before the likes of EVS came along with their clever devices you would have a recording device on the output of each camera channel and a monitor above it, and you would have 26 people sitting down there watching their own camera output with their own monitor and going, ‘oh, look at that foul’ or whatever, marking it up, cueing it and feeding it up to the gallery.”

“There would be a little logo in the corner, with A to Z, so each one had a letter so the director could look and instantly say, we’re going to use A followed by F, followed by Z, and that’s how it was done. The slow-motion replay truck was as big as the OB truck. Then new technology came along where you could get these replays instantly because it was stored on disk and fast memory and one operator can look after four camera channels… then came versions which could look after eight and suddenly you don’t need another truck.”

“Moving onwards to the right we have the Studio Manager, who is a person manager rather than a technical manager. They’re making sure the talent is in front of the cameras, can hear things through the talkback, they’re looking at the right cameras and all that sort of stuff, because the Director and PA don’t have time for that. They don’t have time to be telling people what to do because they’re focused on the structure of the program.”

“The Studio Manager will also be the person liaising with the Technical Director (TD) if there are technical problems or somebody is asking to do something which wasn’t agreed beforehand. Somewhere near to the TD you have a Lighting Director and Audio is either to the right or raised up slightly, looking down on the gallery, especially if they’re sharing the same Preview Program monitors. 

For larger productions Audio typically has its own control room, and if Audio are off by themselves, they’ve got repeats of the Preview, Program and the monitors showing what is coming up next.”

Typically Vision, Grading & Shading are nearby but off in their own group and they are responsible for ensuring the camera systems are set up correctly and delivering what is required.

“Racking they tend to call that and racking, camera control, shading, are all the same sort of thing. Most of that shading is correction happening, not creative decisions like I want a nice pink hue sort of thing. Back in my day you didn’t have those positions because you had one television standard that you were outputting, PAL 625 was the desired output. Whatever you did, whether it was high definition or standard definition, you had everything set up so that the output would make perfect PAL TV. Back then we were right on the transition of going from 4:3 to wide-screen 16:9 so this was the only issue that you had, in fact for a few months in the early days we had tape across the 4:3 monitors to show the 16:9 shape, but as you can imagine, they all got changed very quickly. Then your vision switchers and your electronic technology could cope with 4:3 or 16:9 and you didn’t have to do visual effects to squeeze a picture or stretch a picture to fill the space.”

“Then we started getting into the world of more than one standard. From 1080p to 4K and now of course HDR. Doing a concurrent production for a 4K output and a standard definition output is a nightmare and it still is a nightmare, because everything in your chain has to be capable of doing the two things. Also, different manufacturers views of how to process 4K and process high definition is close enough to be a pain because it needs to be exactly the same. A really top vision engineer is worth their weight in gold in terms of making this happen in a very seamless way, because you don’t want any of the production people that we’ve been speaking about to be sitting there going, ‘oh, that’s not doing quite what I want to do’ without realizing what the issue is. Having a lot of your production people starting to do things remotely through cloud production is making this problem worse, not better.”

“Then there is the challenge of HDR. Most people I have spoken with recently say the best thing to do is produce everything in high definition HDR, because that’s very manageable. Getting things to work in HDR is much more manageable than getting things to work in HD and 4K, so people try to make everything work nicely in HDR.”

“Interestingly there are still some other challenges, for example, ITV have a quota saying that providing 60% of the content was shot in HDR, you can say it’s an HDR program. The BBC is 75%. When you go to Netflix or anybody else, they may have a different percentage of content that they accept as starting off in HDR in order for the final program to be stated as HDR 10 or 10+ or whatever the system is. So once again, the vision engineer has to be across all of that as you go along.  If you’re making a program which is going to be sold to various different outputs, including the US, you’ve got to be right across what the HDR rules are before you start your production. That’s where this Vision Engineer type of role, Technology Director, whatever they want to be called, really is coming into their own and they’re the people who can charge premium rates as a freelancer.”

“The other issue today, for sports in terms of managing stuff is super slow motion because super slow motion doesn’t do HDR. You’ve got to do things to that signal in addition to just capturing it and of course super slow motion is three times faster capture than standard stuff, so in terms of storage of that signal, you fill up storage incredibly quickly with super slow motion. And then there’s shading; trying to shade a super motion camera against a 4K camera or a 1K camera where some of them have got HDR and some of them haven’t is another place where your Vision Engineer, your TD, is coming into play, using that amazing skill set.”

The composition of the Gallery has it seems remained fairly consistent for many years. There is a very good reason for this, having a creative team of this scale work in harmony, under pressure is not to be underestimated. There is a tremendous creative muscle memory required to deliver the exceptional visual production audiences expect.

“Most of the companies like to try and keep the same freelance team together because they know what deliverable they’re going to get. The other thing which comes across when you’ve got the team sorted out to this level is it’s very calm and serene. It’s not the chaos of the news studio for example. It’s surprisingly serene and guests normally comment about how serene the gallery is even though it might be a quite a big, high-pressure shoot.”

The serenity is as we will see as this series unfolds, underpinned by leading edge technology and a lot of engineering expertise.