University of Georgia Selects Abekas Mira for HD Control Room

The University of Georgia Athletic Association has installed an eight-channel Abekas Mira Instant Replay Server in their brand new broadcast control room on campus in Athens, GA. With six camera inputs and two outputs, the Mira is used to capture all the action from multiple venues across campus.

Broadcast operations at the University Athletics department were historically housed in multiple flight packs. Production staff from Daktronics Creative Services would transport the equipment from the Stegeman Coliseum, home of Bulldogs basketball, to the Sanford Stadium for football games. Friday night basketball, followed by Saturday football and then back to basketball on Sunday, placed tremendous pressure on the broadcast operations team to move and reconfigure the flight packs to cover the live action. The Athletic Association has recently undergone a major upgrade in their broadcast operations, which included the Abekas Mira. With a brand new HD broadcast control room housed in a central location and fed from six different venues across campus, the Athletic Association can now cover over 100 events throughout the year. Olympic sports such as volleyball, swimming and diving, gymnastics and softball can now be delivered via webcast or distributed to broadcast partners.

“The first thing that attracted us to Mira was how easy it is to learn,” explains Mike Bilbow, executive director of new media for IMG Georgia Sports Marketing, who helps manage the Athletic Association’s New Media assets. “We rely on a large pool of students to assist many aspects of our big screen and broadcast operations and having a system that is simple and intuitive means fewer errors on air.”

The installation of Mira expands the number of replay sources available for broadcast to six cameras, and provides more playback channels for live instant replay. In addition, Mira allows the operator to develop highlight packages while the game is still in progress. One area that will benefit from this new ability is the Football and Men’s Basketball Coaches Shows, which air each Sunday morning in-season. The New Media group will transfer content directly from the Abekas Mira Server to their Apple Final Cut Pro editing system for finishing. This will speed up the production workflow of the TV show, and allow highlight packages to be posted to the school’s website much faster than before the equipment upgrade.

“University of Georgia Athletics will be our first customer to receive the new Mira Control Surface” says Junaid Sheikh, CEO of Abekas. “We’re excited to see how easily the operators pick up the new interface – feedback so far has been outstanding.”

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