NBC Sunday Night Football Crew Set For Pro Bowl

With heavy snow and temperatures hovering in the single digits this week in the northeast, members of the NBC Sports football production team couldn’t be happier to be in – where else? – Hawaii, for preparations for this weekend’s NFL Pro Bowl.

The game may have a new look – teams were drafted by NFL legends Jerry Rice and Deion Sanders instead of being broken up by conference – but for NBC the production will have a very similar feel to Pro Bowls of the recent past. The NBC Sunday Night Football team headed up by producer Fred Gaudelli and director Drew Esocoff is on hand at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu for the big All-Star sendoff.

“It’s the end of the season and it’s been a great year for us,” says Ken Goss, Senior Vice President, Remote Operations and Production Planning for NBC Sports. “This is always a great way to top it off for us.”

The Pro Bowl will be a dialed down production similarly seen on Sunday Night Football but still features the tech and toys expected at a major sporting event.

NBC will deploy seven hard cameras (versus the normal 14 on a SNF telecast), six handhelds, two super-mos, an RF steadycam, and CableCam. Inside the production compound is seven EVS servers and two Chryon graphics generators.

NEP’s ND4 rolls into the Aloha Stadium compound after spending the past couple of weeks working the golf circuit for Golf Channel and NBC’s coverage of the Hyundai Classic and the Mitsubishi Electric Championship. NBC will use all satellite uplink for transmission.

The operations team has been out setting up since Wednesday and will stay through Sunday. NBC Sports’ Senior Director, Sports Operations Tim DeKime and Technical Manager Bob Hess were critical in assuring that much of the specialty gear made its ay safely across the Pacific to Hawaii following NBC’s coverage of the Wild Card round of the NFL Playoffs.

“Everything logistically has worked terrific,” says Goss. “[Tim and Bob] have done a great job of getting everything shipped over to marry up with the facilities that were over there previously for golf. It’s a well orchestrated group getting everything from the mainland to Hawaii.”

The NFL allows for a lot of creative freedom during the Pro Bowl and NBC will take advantage with the RF camera operator running onto the field in between plays, plus 16 wireless microphones will be on various players and coaches that NBC gets get a feed directly from the NFL.