58 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE GEARHOUSE BROADCAST
Broadcast engineer, Steve Smith, was responsible for Gearhouse's contribution to the CS:GO Major. With experience working for the UK's biggest broadcasters, including the BBC, Sky and ITV, Smith is no stranger to streaming. “I do a lot of work for BBC Sport,” he says. “At the CS:GO Major there were 24 concurrent streams at peak.” Smith enthusiastically echoes the concerns over technical quality and dismisses any idea that streaming should be a poor relation. “Some people will feel that the stuff that's being streamed is less important than the stuff that's being delivered on the normal linear media. On [the CS:GO Major] the bar was very high, and in terms of the budget and what was put into it, that's what broadcasters should be doing and sometimes don't anymore... If you look
at Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, they broadcast at higher bitrates and resolutions than networks do. What we're delivering is higher quality than stuff that's on network.” KEEPING RESOLUTIONS In common with a lot of sports material, the Major was produced at high frame rate, and at 1080p resolution to satisfy the demands of people watching high-resolution computer monitors at close range. “I'm used to working in 1080i50,” Smith continues. “This was working in 1080p59.94, which stretches some of the equipment more than others. We were working in 3G-SDI. Some equipment is capable of that, but a fair bit of consideration had to be taken in terms of what equipment was brought in.” Sony's 4K-capable HDC-4300 broadcast cameras were used specifically because 4K
requires 3G-SDI and therefore 1080p59.94 images are possible. Preparation included two previous, smaller-scale jobs. “We did a small event in June, which I was involved in setting up, and there was an event in Twickenham the week or so before. We spent three days setting up for the small event in Twickenham, which didn't have our cameras but did have the infrastructure.” On that occasion, FACEIT had provided its own cameras, but in both cases the need to include in-game pictures, which are not generally synchronised to the rest of the video system, required extra gear. Smith remembers that “just about every source FACEIT provided, all the cameras they gave to us, the graphics, all had to be synchronised. We had 48 synchronisers, we used 45 or 46 of them!”
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