Live From the U.S. Open: Game Creek by the Numbers
Story Highlights
Game Creek Video was the exclusive provider of remote-production facilities for Fox Sports’ first-ever production of the U.S. Open Championship. Game Creek’s Encore, accompanied by the world’s first large-scale IP-based routing system in a remote-production facility, was the primary home for all event coverage.
Alongside Encore,Game Creek’s Glory was deployed Fox Sports’ U.S. Open 360 program; Pride, for the studio shows; and Justice, for feature-group/hole coverage. The company’s B3 unit provided a home for new-technology initiatives, with more than 155 hours of programming generated out of the various mobile units.
Inside Encore’s massive replay area
Game Creek deployed more than 65 Sony cameras of the 118 onsite, including 10 new Sony HDC-4300 cameras, accompanied by Canon 95×9.3 and 100×9.6 lenses. The new Evertz SDVN and EXE enabled Fox to facilitate 850 router salvos, 10,759 source virtual ports, 10,142 destination virtual ports, 1,558 images in Encore alone, 13 transmission paths, 70 discrete feeds to Glory, 86 to Pride, 47 to Justice, and 88 discrete feeds to international. There were 370 HD-SDI feeds in total leaving Encore.
On the audio side, more than 200 microphones were fed into four Calrec Apollo consoles, one Calrec Artemis, and two Calrec Summa consoles as well as 24 Hydra2 boxes spread throughout the course. Five booth kits also serviced three studio sets. Game Creek used 58 MADI outputs, 288 channels of TDM audio, and 5,592 Calrec audio channels between Encore and Justice alone. The audio-router size for the Open was 15,296×13,504, and Fox used all 656 ports across three tri-bussed intercom frames.
On the replay side, 37 EVS replay servers (24 XT3s, 13 XT2+s) and 164 channels of replay populated the production system, with 52 playout channels. Throughout the compound, 19 IPDirectors, three database servers, nine XTAccess engines, five XFile3s, 16 XHub3s, and 27 remotes came together to write more than 25,000 files. Collectively, 5,751 clips and 1,600 hours of record space created the largest remote EVS network ever deployed in a remote television production. Fox used four of the new EVS MultiReview systems, which allow the operator to call up templates for different holes and see all the available camera angles.
Most important, Game Creek Video is putting this massive system together with 14 world-class engineers led by Project Manager Mike Copeland.
“We began planning for this event 18 months ago,” he says. “With this planning came the creation of Encore, which turned out to be the ideal facility for an event of this magnitude. Countless hours of preparation have led to this, the largest single-event, single-client broadcast in the history of remote television and an outstanding on-air product for our longtime partner and client, Fox Sports.”
