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Expectations for live sports broadcasts run high, even when the camera is tiny, remote, and moving at a hundred miles per hour. With productions relying on pictures from dozens of cameras, combining high speed and HDR with wireless links and control systems, outside broadcast providers often deploy an entire department to handle the more specialist and unusual side of image gathering.

Sean Seavers is Business Development Manager - Speciality Capture at NEP, with eighteen years of operational experience on outside broadcasts before moving into his current role two years ago. Seavers summarizes his experience by referencing a couple of examples: “I’ve been working on projects in the field for many years, everything from racing to golf to one-offs - including a trip to Mount Everest in 2014.”

Everywhere All At Once

The interaction between that sort of ambition and the technology to fulfil it, Seavers goes on, begins with a discussion. “Clients come to us and we collaborate with them, set up the infrastructure and provide for them the best solution to meet their needs.” The sheer scale of the challenge, Seavers suggests, is perhaps best illustrated by auto sport. “For a tier-one NASCAR race, we often equip ten cars with four cameras per car. There are cameras that are pointed out of the front of the car, and you have a camera focused on the driver. Overall we’re utilizing 40 cameras, then we’ll also equip 30 additional cars with one camera each.”

Beyond the camera installation, each car might have two radio links. “We provide dual streams on those ten broadcast cars. Each car will have two feeds simultaneously, and we will switch, on one of those paths. We’ll leave the driver up on one path and follow the action coming from production, and remotely switch it on the other path. This includes a pedal shot and a brake shot on one path.”

With broadcasters in a perpetual state of pushing the envelope, the demand for more capability - especially in less space - is constant. “We’re looking at every camera that’s out there, for example a Dreamchip Atom One, a Proton, a Sony stabilized point-of-view,” Seavers points out. “It keeps improving on the small POVs. We really put a lot of time in, especially in our Hanover office. We try to stay with the same imager across the board and we even looked in house at building our own imagers.”

Seavers’ role means staying on top of recent releases. “We’re always working with different camera vendors on the latest tech. It depends on what kind of form factor we’re looking for, and what video quality we’re looking for,” Seavers muses. “It’s about finding the best camera that will fit. Whether it’s a horse racing or golf production, it’s an HDR world for us. Everything’s going to HDR, even for our in-car cameras we’re going with HDR native. We’re looking at a bunch of different cameras.”

Some of the trickiest camera positions involve sporting equipment, a situation which can earn the attention of a sport’s governing body. Even so, Seavers says, it has been a growth industry - “especially our pylon program for [American] football. In 2014 we had two kits supporting Monday and Saturday night football games. Our pylon division has grown to having 26 kits supporting productions in a single weekend across the country.”

Vision At Scale

The numbers, then, are large, and the demands are as varied as live events can be. Taking all of those disparate picture sources and prepping them for air is something that Seavers’ team handles internally. “For broadcast sports specialty capture, we do all of the vision mixing. We aren’t asking the vision engineer to shade those because it’s such a large deployment.”

Doing that work requires taking the sort of control over the camera which might usually be part of a system camera’s fiber-optic control link. Some of the cameras deployed by Seavers and his team have unusual features, and those must still be made accessible to people working in a fast-paced operational environment, creating no small demand for custom development work. “Whether it’s a Sony, whether it’s a Dreamchip, whether it’s a Proton, we have a strong software team because we need to have control of all of these cameras. The Sony HDC-3500V has the variable ND. We want to put it on RF, and we want to get control of it while we’re still using one 12KHz control channel.”

Even moment-to-moment color control, Seavers says, involves some integration effort. “To do that many cameras and have control sent to those is a big task, to stay on top of that, to stay on top of so many cameras.” The actual control interface, meanwhile, varies. “On our racing events we’ll have an RCP that we’ve developed from a vendor to be able to paint all of the onboards. On top of that, we’re seeing shallow-depth-of-field cameras which some of our clients want to paint on a Cyanview.”

Outdoor events in changeable weather and harsh sun, Seavers confirms, make vision engineers work hard, especially where specialist or miniature cameras might not have the same performance as less space and power-constrained, pedestal-mount system cameras. “You have to ride [the settings] depending on where the shade on the track is, depending where the sun is. Our team in the field understands the flow of a racing production very well, and they stay across all of the cameras we have up.”

Making such a blend of technologies and techniques practical in the field, Seavers reinforces, relies greatly on human communication. “Our engineers and technical staff have great relationships with the top vision mixers in the country. They communicate, they talk beforehand, they have a game plan for all of the tracks. We stay on top of it to match the vision mixer.” The idea of HDR actually making that work somewhat easier is one that has found cautious acceptance in many areas of broadcast. “It’s a little bit more on the front end, making sure everything’s adjusted and we’re all reading off of the same type of scope. To deliver that many cameras, and have this type of control, is a big challenge but one we are prepared for.”

A Wireless World

In many of the situations faced by Seavers and his team, acquiring the picture is only part of the project: retrieving it from a remote or fast-moving camera means radio links - a field which has recently seen some new ideas.  “We’re still putting in COFDM,” Seavers reports, “but we’re now working with 5G as well. We’re in the initial stages of doing a mix of COFDM and 5G transmitters. So for many tier-one events like golf, racing and football, 5G is trending. Our clients are eager to use 5G transmitters, so it has become a growing area of expertise for our teams.”

NEP’s interest in 5G is such that the company’s own hardware development department was, as Seavers puts it, “a bit early to the game with our 5G MT-UHD transmitter. It was right after the pandemic. The encoder we built won best in show at NAB. When we first started developing it, there wasn’t a lot of traction from the wireless carriers in the states. Now they’re very engaged, and they like the encoder we built. We just completed a major tier-one golf event where we utilized eight 5G transmitters. We used our NEP transmitter, and our receiver, while the radios and the infrastructure around the course were provided by the carrier.”

Current practice, Seavers says, might involve “supplying 45 [radio-linked] cameras to a tier-one golf event where we’re bringing back in COFDM. On this one, you’ll still have 45, but instead of us providing 45 COFDM links, eight of them will be 5G. Right now it’s still early in the game but it’s developing quickly. If a lot of the wireless spectrum goes out for auction we have to be able to be agile. It’s in the initial stages, but we know eventually we’re going to be there.”

Technology evolves with the passage of time, but, as Seavers reflects, the scale and complexity of NEP’s work seems unlikely to slow down. “Our team takes a lot of pride in delivering the very best solutions to our clients so they can deliver for their audiences. For example, for a tier-one auto racing production - when you’re talking about 40 RF links bringing back video from every onboard camera, 12 RF paths bringing back handheld cameras, plus shallow-depth-of-field and helicopter cameras - you’re talking about 52 links bringing back 83 cameras overall. It is very impressive when you walk into one of these events. It’s invigorating for us to navigate that spectrum and deliver up to 84 cameras for a broadcast, and that’s just the specialty capture side. We come to these major productions with a lot of firepower and it is very satisfying to be able to achieve that.”