GamePlan Technologies Huddles Up With Panasonic, MPEG-4

By Carolyn Braff

When it comes to implementing HD in college sports video departments, a unified, cost-effective and storage efficient strategy has yet to surface. GamePlan Technologies, a provider of networked video systems for collegiate and professional teams, hopes to change all of that by introducing the GamePlan HD Coaching Network.

“At the college level, it has generally been decided that the cost of infrastructure, bandwidth, and storage is too high to make HD realistic,” explains Dave Glover, CEO of GamePlan. “We have proven that to not be the case with this [Panasonic] P2 process over standard Ethernet and high-quality compression.”

GP HD coaching analysis software is fully compatibility with Panasonic P2, and shows a commitment to the use of MPEG-4 proxies.

One of the critical components in the development of GP HD was compressing an HD media file so that it can more quickly move across an Ethernet network. A one-hour video HD video file can be upwards of 60 GB in size making it difficult to easily transfer via Ethernet. But GP HD makes use of MPEG-4 HD in an AVI wrapper to cut that size down to 6 GB with similar video quality, according to Glover.

“The video quality of the files is so difficult to tell apart that coaches and video professionals couldn’t tell the difference between the files,” he explains.

For the purposes of coaching analysis, video must be able to be distributed across Ethernet and scaled to upwards of 30 workstations on a network. GP HD is designed to do just that as video playback of MPEG-4 HD maintains high resolution and is fully controllable for slow motion and slow motion reverse, using an industry-standard remote control.

Using Panasonic’s P2 cards, GP HD users have access to a workflow that is almost automatic.

“The workflow of the system is basically plug in a P2 card, select the clips you want, hit make MPEG-4 HD and walk away,” Glover explains. “The system takes all the data, converts video, converts all the files and you’re off and running. We’re very excited about doing more advanced development with Panasonic.”

Advanced editing and trim technologies speed up the process of ingesting content from a P2 camera since, as Glover says, “in the sports world, it’s all about speed.”

GamePlan started working with MPEG-4 three years ago, so the company has always been a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting the latest formats. Glover admits that he may have invested a bit prematurely, but he sees no other way to service the industry.

“I personally would be very wary of buying any software that doesn’t have an HD guarantee,” he says. “The GamePlan mantra is everything’s going HD, so deal with it. By 2010 it’s going to be very difficult to get non-HD devices, so these video concerns have to be handled.”

The GP HD system is still in Beta but all the components are working and Glover expects to release it this summer. In the meantime, GP HD will be on display at this year’s Collegiate Sports Video Association conference to be held from May 11-14 in Jacksonville, FL.