Live from Super Bowl XLIX: University of Phoenix Stadium Control Room Team Ready to Super Bowl Fans

The University of Phoenix hosted a Super Bowl only five years ago but fans in the stadium who might have attended that game will find a newly revamped scoreboard experience courtesy of a new control room and a new Daktronics scoreboard that has 4.8 million pixels and allowed the previous large board to move to the other side of the stadium. “It has 10 times the pixels of the old board,” says Shane Gavin, University of Phoenix Stadium, event and systems engineer.

Shane Gavin inside the University of Phoenix stadium control room’s machine room, featuring a wealth of Evertz equipment.

Gavin says that while Big Screen Productions will produce the in-venue Super Bowl audio and video experience the stadium’s production team will be manning the positions.

“We have the most experienced production team in the league, by far,” he says. “Our camera guys will be here, our audio mixer will do a submix of all playout sources, and our TD is switching the show.”

The Super Bowl production will feature 13 cameras, two more than are used for Arizona Cardinal games. The two cameras will be used for shooting the on-air talent while Sony HDC-2570 cameras and Sony F55 cameras will be used for the game coverage.

“The Sony 2570 cameras can send 1080p 60fps over triax or run at two-times frame rate at 1080i or 720p to do slow-motion replays simultaneously,” adds Gavin.

Construction of the new control room began on June 25 and involved knocking down walls and adding more racks. Located on press level, the video-control room feeds every videoboard in the venue as well as four billboard roadway signs and two marquee displays on the venue’s exterior. Anchoring the equipment at the core is Evertz EQX router and terminal equipment. The room also features Ross Video’s Acuity switcher, two four-channel XPression graphics servers, and MultiViewer; five Evertz DreamCatcher replay servers; Vista Systems Spyder X20 video processor; DiGiCo SD10 audio console; AJA Video Systems KiPro recorders; Grass Valley K2 Summit media servers; Ikegami monitors; Riedel intercoms; and Adobe Premier editing software.  The Cardinals worked closely with each vendor, as well as with Pro Sound, to select the ideal piece of equipment.