NEAL ROMANEK: What has been some of your practical remote production experience recently?
STEVEN DARGHAM: For the America’s Cup, we had two of the events in Europe cancelled due to Covid-19. Luckily, it went ahead in New Zealand. At Telstra, we put in a network a year ago. It needed modifying slightly, but we ended up doing the America’s Cup without a single person fromTelstra on-site. TIM PUSCHKEIT: Riedel worked on the America’s Cup project, too.We started three years ago.The plan was to do a series in six or seven different venues across Europe and the US. We even did recce missions and site visits. Instead, we spent six months in Auckland, New Zealand. But, in that time, we did prototype engineering. It was challenging, because we follow a 360-degree approach.We not only did the broadcast, but the technology on the boats and the race management system.We already had some remote solutions installed, with remote
engineering and data logging on the boats, plus the cloud was a remote solution, too.We also had remote edit suites operating in Europe that could create news feeds overnight. Nonetheless, due to restrictions, not a single broadcaster was able to go over there.We usedTelstra’s redundant fibre to feed out to local broadcasters. Steven and I spent a lot of time on the phone between Auckland and where he was in Sydney, trying to figure things out. In the end, we used everything we had, because the local broadcasters asked for so many things: individual signals, a different voiceover and other unilateral services.We were flat out. That’s something we need to learn. Infrastructures and set-up need to be prepared for big events in the future. NORBERT PAQUET: One thing has been the production planning and coordination of resource. Usually, the main conversation is around latency management: how do we manage the different latencies introduced by remote or distributed operation? Communication is fundamental to everything. As soon as you introduce latency into communication, it impacts the entire production and value chain.We’ve looked at solutions that manage the overall set of latencies introduced by the different paths the audio takes, and then how you resynchronise that in the end. We had a lot of discussions with customers around codecs and compression ratios, because bandwidth is also an element to consider. Some people have one gig uplink – some don’t – so you have to pay attention to that.
WATCH THIS CLIP AT FEEDMAGAZINE.TV
“WE HAD REMOTE EDIT SUITES IN EUROPETHAT COULD CREATE
NEWS FEEDS OVERNIGHT”
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