For ‘Shining’ Finale, CBS Sports Builds Out Houston Edit Facilities

CBS Sports’ engineering team is no stranger to Houston, having produced multiple NFL games and several basketball regionals out of the city’s Reliant Stadium. Those contests, however, did not require the networked editing facilities that are necessary to deliver every angle of every play to the producers of the featured “One Shining Moment” finale that will top off Monday night’s NCAA Championship game.

For the Final Four games, CBS Sports has 66 EVS channels at its disposal, plus an additional 20 channels for the pregame show. The game crew has four six-channel EVS servers, one four-channel, four six-channels dedicated to the super-slow-motion cameras, and four EVS SpotBox applications. Bexel’s BBSOne truck provides an additional four-channel and a six-channel EVS unit, for a total of 66 channels of EVS, all networked together. With two six-channel EVSs and two four-channels, the pregame show has 20 additional channels to work with.

“‘One Shining Moment’ is finished in the Bexel truck, and they have access to all of the clips that are created,” says Bruce Goldfeder, director of engineering for CBS Sports. “They have access to all of the angles of all of the plays, and they are fed during the game. If the guys think there is a good shot, they’ll call over to the truck and say take a look at this.”

Going back to round one of the tournament, that makes for a lot of content for the editors to sift through. Although the edit team is faced with a daunting task, the vast amount of content at their fingertips should make for a fabulous montage to close the three-week tournament.

“The multiple possibilities of shots for ‘One Shining Moment’ are incredible,” says Ken Aagaard, EVP of engineering, operations, and production services for CBS Sports. “They start with the melts from all of the tournament games, going right back to round one. All of the options are there; the hard part is selecting the shots.”

All together, CBS has five editing facilities on-site in Houston: a linear-edit room, two Avid stations, a tape-playout area, and an Adobe After Effects suite. To ferry all of that edited material between New York and Atlanta, CBS has set up dedicated receive and transmit lines between the three cities.

“We’ve been sending pieces back continuously,” Goldfeder points out. “They shoot here, send pieces back to New York to be edited, finish them, and send them back. We have a full-time transmit and receive line for that.”

The main challenge involved in moving all that content back and forth, he says, was on the IT side: “The big struggle with all of this was getting the IT people to buy into all of the opening of fire walls and permissions and ports.

“They joined in and saw what we were doing and were very helpful,” he adds. “Now I can go and get permissions within 6-8 hours to move things around for different things that I’m trying. That helped considerably.”