Orad PlayMaker Sports Replay Server Enhances UEFA Under-21 Championship Coverage

Orad’s PlayMaker sports replay server played a significant role in the production of the UEFA Euro Under-21 Championships. The 15-game tournament was produced by Mizmor Productions. Mizmor has used PlayMaker for major sports productions extensively over the past four years.

“PlayMaker enabled a great variety of camera angles to be replayed during the game,” comments Daniel Lankry, CEO of Mizmor Productions. “In addition, with PlayMaker’s file sharing between multiple servers, we were able to edit three types of highlights: a 10-minute recap of each half, summary of all goals and best plays, and all other major events such as red cards, substitutions, etc.”

In this high profile production, the group stage games were covered by 12 cameras, two of them super slow motion, at three times less the normal speed. With its eight-channel servers and flexible configuration, only three PlayMakers were required for the task, with each operator having two outputs for back-to-back playout of replays with a mix effect. In the semifinals and finals, an additional PlayMaker was added to cover a total of 14 cameras; three of them super slow motion, with one of the PlayMakers mixing super slow motion and standard cameras simultaneously.

Lankry adds, “The actual production started two hours before the match and consisted of editing the highlights of the players’ arrival, warm-ups and the pre-game ceremony. The highlights were then transmitted to the EBU satellite to be used by other broadcasters.”

PlayMaker’s Smart Event touch screen tagging tool provided the operators the ability to instantly tag every play or clip with all relevant metadata such as player’s name, action, etc. to be immediately sorted and recalled according to the director’s request.

PlayMaker’s PlayNet module with fast Gigabit connection provided instant clip sharing between multiple servers, for highlights editing and bumpers playout from any angle.

With PlayMaker Ethernet-based import and export tools, all pre-game segments were easily imported from a standard windows NLE environment, instantly available for playout.