[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to this broadcast to post episode on cost effective sports video production. I'm your host Michael Kammes. Now we're hosting this episode because Key Code Media works closely with sports production teams as a systems integrator, helping them build smarter, more efficient and more flexible production environments and across control rooms, trucks, camera chains, LED walls, graphics and so much more. We're proud to support amazing sports brands like University of Wyoming, UCLA, UC Davis, the Dallas Cowboys, the Detroit Tigers, MetLife Stadium, and more.
So we're kicking things off with a short explainer on the top Cost Saving Strategies for Sports Production, covering a few practical ways teams can stretch their budgets without sacrificing quality.
We'll then move into our keynote interview with Dennis Trappini from the University of Wyoming.
[00:01:03] Speaker C: Let's get to it.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Sports production is changing fast. It's no longer just about football and basketball. High school and collegiate programs are now streaming everything from volleyball and wrestling to cross country.
And yes, there are even new emerging niche sports with growing audiences like League of pigs on YouTube.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: And if you haven't heard of it,
[00:01:34] Speaker B: just look it up. You'll thank me later. Not every program has an NFL or NBA budget, but every team still wants to deliver a polished, reliable multicam production that looks professional and works every time. That's why we put together this list of practical ways to cut costs without cutting quality. Number one Go IP with your workflow design.
If your building already has fiber or Cat 6 Ethernet everywhere, use it. Protocols like NDI are built as an IP connectivity standard for video, audio and metadata over standard networks, and DANTE does the same thing for audio over IP via Ethernet. That means fewer dedicated runs, fewer breakout boxes, and a lot more flexibility when someone says, can we just add one more camera?
Number 2 use PTZ cameras where they make sense.
Not every sport needs a full crew
[00:02:28] Speaker C: at every camera position.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Pan tilt zoom cameras can store preset positions, and newer systems even add things like auto tracking, which can simplify coverage in gyms, training spaces and certain lower profile sports that could reduce operator count without sacrificing a clean production.
Number three Stop doing graphics the hard way. If your graphics workflow still depends on manual copy and paste before every game, that's time and labor that you don't need to spend. Ros Expressions Data link tools can automatically populate live graphics from external data sources, including formats like xml, JSON, RSS, and database sources. In other words, let the data feed the graphic instead of making a human retype the same names and stats all night before game day. Number four build one button automation an Elgato stream deck paired with software like BitFocus Companion or Buttons, turns affordable hardware into professional control surfaces for broadcast gear playback and other production tools. In fact, this is exactly what Keycode Media has deployed in our very own podcast studio.
It's how you create the easy button for record, replay, camera presets, tally actions, or any repetitive step that slows people down. See, the point is to not make things fancy. The point is to make them repeatable.
Number five make your control room reusable.
One of the biggest cost savers is not rebuilding the whole room every time the sport changes. If your switcher, router, graphics and control system can recall presets or save sessions, you can move from football to soccer to volleyball much faster, with less prep and fewer mistakes. That saves time before the show. And of course, time is money.
Number six Use remote operation when staffing is tight.
Remote Integration Model, or REMY for short, is taking advantage of at home production, and it's a lot more than just bringing a field reporter into the newsroom today. Remote production can handle a much bigger part of the show, with freelancers or contractors operating graphics and video switchers, commentary and other production roles from just about anywhere. In the right situation. That means less travel, less local staffing pressure, and a lot more flexibility when you need to cover more events with fewer people.
Number seven Right Size the gear and look for dual purpose buys. See, this is where budgets get blown. You may want the expensive camera or premium package, but the better question is what does production actually need?
A volleyball gym may not need the same equipment as a football broadcast. And if the same piece of gear can support athletics, graduation, recruiting and other campus events, that's even better. Shared funding across departments can make a better system possible without overstretching just one budget.
Number eight don't forget about monetization. We've talked a lot about saving money, but there's another side to the equation. Making to production the generate money one path is ott. Today, it's more realistic than ever for a school or program to create its own streaming platform and offer access to live games, archive content and other programming for a monthly fee. Even a modest subscription model can add up when you have a loyal community of fans that want to follow the team. Another opportunity is your old scoreboard. In a lot of venues, it may be time to move toward LED walls, and LED has become far more affordable than it used to be, and it opens the door for dynamic advertising, sponsor messaging, and other content that can create new revenue during your games. Instead of a static board, you now have a screen that can work harder for the program and for the sponsors supporting it. At the end of the day, cost effective sports production is not about doing less.
[00:06:18] Speaker C: It's about designing smarter, automating repeat work
[00:06:21] Speaker B: and choosing gear that fits you your actual use cases.
So if your team is planning a new sports facility, upgrading an existing control room or trying to do more production with a tighter budget, Keycode media can help. We have competitive low cost bundles ready to go and your first consultation is free.
College sports production is under pressure to do more with less. High end football and basketball production still need to look polished and professional. But many other sports also have to
[00:07:01] Speaker C: be covered in a way that is
[00:07:02] Speaker B: right size for the budget, the staff and of course the realities of your campus. Dennis Trapani oversees Wyo Vision and Wyoming athletics video and production efforts across 17 teams. And the university's upgraded sports video facility in Laramie supports football, basketball, volleyball and soccer with a control room that includes NDI ready switching plus ros expression graphics and replay workflows. That makes Dennis a strong voice on the balance between top tier game day production and cost effective workflows for the rest of the team. Dennis, let's jump right into the questions. So you made the decision to move to two control rooms.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: One focused on complex productions like football
[00:07:44] Speaker A: and basketball and the other one built
[00:07:46] Speaker B: for more a wider range of campus sports. How did you decide what belonged in
[00:07:50] Speaker C: each room and how did that change the way you designed the workflows for the staff that you needed?
[00:07:57] Speaker A: It really just had to do a lot with the complexity of, of each sports broadcast.
You know, there, there are a lot of times, you know, where we'll have double headers in a day. You know, I think coming up this fall we have three football, volleyball, double headers.
So football will be out of the main control room, volleyball will be out of the secondary control room.
The nice thing is with the upgrades we've done in the main control room, the secondary control room is pretty much a fully functional control room that can do a 6 to 8 camera shoot now. So we've kind of bridged the gap between the two rooms, which is nice. Football, basketball are very, very complex shows. They're nine, ten camera shoots, lots of replays, lots of graphics, lots of audio sources.
And so the main room is really built for that. In addition, there are some positions that we have, PIERO for instance, first and 10 line for football, telestration for football and basketball that the other sports don't have in their broadcast. So that's the bigger room that's got far more functionality, but the other room can still do a really, really good, like I said, six to eight camera shoot if we need to.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Is there anything that the smaller room
[00:09:09] Speaker C: can do that the larger room can't or was it built with full redundancy? So you do have everything you can do in the main room and then it becomes just a smaller scale in the smaller room.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: The main room is more of a traditional baseband SDI room, fiber, all that stuff. The secondary room is much more of an NDI room.
We can do far more NDI sources in that room than than we can in the main room, which is great. We have a very complex network of Netgear switches that we've built up over the years using our fiber infrastructure.
So pretty much all of our facilities are connected on the same network. So it's very easy to say, go out to soccer and plug a camera that goes inside the goal, a little POV Marshall camera, an NDI camera into a switch and it automatically shows up in both control rooms.
So that's kind of helped, which is great because on the days when we have two or three events, we're able to very easily deploy a full NDI show at one of those facilities to kind of make the load a little lighter.
[00:10:22] Speaker C: Actually, let's dig into that because that's probably one of the most common topics we talk about here with guests and live production and especially broadcast and sports is the movement from traditional SDI based video to NDI and DANTE audio and video over ethernet practices.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: So you didn't mention it, but if
[00:10:40] Speaker C: I'm not mistaken, you have a tricaster and you are utilizing ndi. So how do ndi, Dante and moving towards an IP based workflow help you keep production flexible and more cost effective?
[00:10:52] Speaker A: You know, we have a more traditional SDI switcher in the main room, but up in the secondary room up here, which is located in our office, you know, we've got a TC2 Elite, we've got a 3P2, we've got NDI expression. ROS. Expression for graphics.
It just makes it a little easier in the sense of, like I said, a lot of these devices are poe. You go, you have a POE switch that's hooked into that network we've built. You hook an ethernet cable into it, it turns on, it powers, it gives, you know, powers and it gives you signal. So to drop things like that or you know, to put a camera on the net, on the net stanchion. In volleyball, you know, it's one ethernet cable you have to run up there. It makes things a lot easier in terms of running all that cable. And like I said, you know, if, if it's a triple header day and you know, we've got two control rooms and three events, so obviously one of those control rooms is pulling double duty that day.
If you can do one of the shows with, with NDI cameras and you know, sei to NDI adapters on another set of cameras, it's very, very easy to just go into the TRIC replay and select those as NDI sources and still pull off a really good show.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: So to get into the little nuts
[00:12:06] Speaker C: and bolts a little bit, obviously there's different flavors of ndi and obviously we have different rasters of ndi. So where do your broadcasts typically fall into? Are we talking full bandwidth ndi? Are we talking hdx? What do you normally push through there?
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Well, we're still doing 1080 I, you know, that's, that's just where we were built and we've continued with it, you know. So we are doing pretty much full bandwidth 1080i, which doesn't take up as much as say 3G. So it gives us a little more flexibility in terms of sources there.
[00:12:38] Speaker C: Excellent.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Well, let's talk about another hot topic
[00:12:41] Speaker C: that we discuss quite a bit here on Broadcaster post, and that's automation, right? So in your setups with both rooms, what could you automate today in your environments that reduce setup time, simplify operation and make events easier for a wide range of your staff members to run?
[00:13:00] Speaker A: A lot of it is off stream decks.
We do a lot of automation off stream decks and it's things like rolling your commercial breaks, right? Because you can have a button on a stream deck that takes the correct source on your switcher and clean. You turn the graphics off at the same time, it can cue your DDR player.
In our main room especially, we run our commercials off of a couple of blackmagic hyperdecks.
So you can cue that, you can run it, you can make that pot the mixer up so the A1 doesn't need to worry about that, you know, because I think in a traditional broadcast environment where you're in a truck, you're, you're on the line with master control and master control is doing that, that main potting down of the master mix and the potting up of the commercials and rolling the commercials in a situation like ours where, you know, a lot of our breaks on our streaming service are pass through or we have to run them.
And so to be able to automate that. And, you know, for a student that's TDing or running audio or directing or whatever, for it to be a one button push and everything they need done is taken care of, that makes things a lot simpler for. For students and for me, quite frankly.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: So you mentioned Stream Deck for automation, and that's kind of the top portion of it, right? We have the underlying technology that makes it work.
Are you using things like bitfocus, Companion? Are you utilizing native tools that Stream Deck has? And who's building all these macros? Is this something that you're teaching the students, or is that something you're tinkering on the weekends?
[00:14:39] Speaker A: It's Companion. Companion's great because name a piece of broadcast equipment and Companion probably has a plugin for it.
Generally it's me and Laura from my. One of my full timers on my staff. She's our other live producer.
And a lot of times it's just trial and error and it's like, hey, I wonder if this could do this. Or sometimes you're in the middle of a game and you think, oh, if, if this button could do this, that would make this a lot easier. You jot it down, you work on it after the game maybe.
But it's us, you know, and we have students here and there that are like, hey, I want to figure out why that button works, not just know that it works. And if they do, we'll sit them down and show them.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: What I like about some of the
[00:15:20] Speaker C: other technology you mentioned are things like poe. And normally when you have devices that are POE powered, a lot of times that means there's some kind of web server, right, built into the device, which means you now are not only controlling power up and power down, but you're also controlling color, temperature, and other things like that. So it's not only the kind of binary on and off, but you're also crafting the scene on the fly as to what the situation calls for. So that's fantastic.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.
Probably my biggest use is our slam cams in basketball.
And they're on some RAM mounts that are connected to the stanchion, but they're way up high behind the glass.
And we had, before we were using traditional SDI cameras and we didn't have the RS 232ft or the fiber feed or any of that stuff to shade it.
Back in the control room, when we move to these NDI cameras, that's the best part, is somebody doesn't have to get up on the ladder and clip through the control dongle anymore, they can get the framing right. And then don't worry about the rest. I'll go in the computer and do it before you're back up in the control room. So that has made things very, very easy. And I will say that's a case where I like that functionality so much that even in our main room, where we have a more baseband SDI control room, I've got two NDI decoders into my switcher for those cameras so that I can still use them and still shade them remotely and everything.
[00:16:55] Speaker C: Tail wagging the dog. I love it. I love it.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: So if we take automation to a different part of the production workflow, right. Not just the text using it, we look towards maybe automating graphics. Right. The traditional workflow was someone was spending the night before creating graphics, static graphics for each player and their name and their position or stats. But now we can do intelligent graphics.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:20] Speaker C: Graphics are tying into databases.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: So can you talk about how you're
[00:17:24] Speaker C: utilizing automation with graphics so you can have less prep time and more relevant data in the middle of that play?
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yeah. And I can say from experience, early in my career, many years ago, I did a lot of freelance chiron operations and you didn't have what you have now. And so I completely know and understand and have suffered through that typing everything in the day before.
But no, like I said, we use ROS expression in both of our control rooms. Data Link is probably the most powerful tool we have because at any given time we're pulling clock data and score data from our OES controller that automates that.
We're pulling spreadsheet data that is populating roster cards and lineups and all that stuff.
We're pulling a dashboard that is operating said graphics and we're pulling maybe most importantly, the stats xml. So when we have a game going on, one of our communications people, our sports information people, is stating the game out in the facility.
Well, that is going into a server, a cloud server called Genius Stats. That's the company that does this across college athletics. And what you're able to do with that is you can generate an XML file.
There are a couple different ways you can do it. If you can get your expression on the same network as that computer, you can just generate it to a store folder.
For instance, here we have a.
We have a NAS server that's connected to our network.
And then the SIDS computers are all hooked into a share folder on there. The XML goes there, the expression reads it the other way to do it is Genius makes a product called Scoreboard Bridge, which if you have a subscription with them, you can download for free.
And you can find your game if you have your login. And that will generate the XML locally on the expression and it'll ping every, every two seconds, five seconds. However you have it set up for new data.
What that is done though is you are able to, once you go in and learn all the, what all the keys are like points is PTS and rebounds is reb and assist is as.
Once you figure out that language, it's very, very easy to go into a graphic, lower third graphic, let's say, and set it up where you're clicking a jersey number on a dashboard and so that is automatically pulling the name and the position from the spreadsheet.
And then simultaneously that number is going into the stats data and going, okay, I need number five points, number five's rebounds and number five assists. And so you can set that up where one button click on a dashboard or a stream deck if you want it that way, and boom, your graphic is already done and it's up to date and it's accurate.
[00:20:26] Speaker C: It's amazing.
The time savings, obviously you have to build that back end and make sure every endpoint is talking to every other endpoint. But the fact that you're able to get that up to date data through just a mouse click and everything else in the background is just phenomenal.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a lot on the back end. Like I said, you have to get the coding down, if you will.
It's not true coding, obviously, but you have to, you have to get the sequence and the file path and everything correct. But once you do, it's it, you know, we set it up once in the preseason and then it's good for the whole year.
So that's been a, that's been a big help in terms of maybe before the game you have to go in and set up maybe, maybe there are 10 or so graphics you have to do just, you know, things you, storylines you might want to cover, things you want to have prepped for, for dead periods in the game.
But those things like stats, you don't have to go in and type everything in the way you used to.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: So now you mentioned that you have
[00:21:26] Speaker C: built a lot of this yourself and there's some students that are interested in learning this. But I found that quite often one of the biggest challenges that colleges have in places like Laramie, I'm sure, is finding the right people to work the games.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: So how do you recruit and manage
[00:21:42] Speaker C: camera ops, producers, TDs and commentators for your productions.
[00:21:48] Speaker A: We've got a good group of students and former students here in Laramie. We don't have a J school at uw, so that is.
That's a challenge.
So, you know, we put out feelers almost every semester for new students. And, you know, if we're lucky, we'll get two or three at a time.
Like I said, we're lucky. Right now I've got a group of.
I would say five. Five students or former students. Actually, they're all former students at this point.
Two of them work for me full time. We've hired them on full time. The other three have other jobs in town, and they do this on the side as a side gig. So that's been a very good group. And that's. That's really my core control room group. You know, that's where my replay and graphics and director and producer and all that generally come from. And we've got some students that supplement. There's camera operators. That's kind of a different story because I can teach somebody to use an expression or a carbonite or a tricaster or a three play.
I've always felt when it comes to camera operation, you're either good at it or you're not. Right.
I've been very fortunate to have done some work for the Denver Broncos over the years, work on their. On the Thunder Vision crew.
And so I've made a lot of really good relationships in Denver.
So a lot of those people come up and do games for us, and they've led to other relationships with people down in the Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins areas.
And they make the drive up. And so, you know, we go local as much as we can, but, you know, we do supplement with professionals quite a bit.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: So is there also the concept of cross training, so students teaching other students or some of your camera ops who are the more experienced of the crew? It sounds like kind of bestowing their knowledge to other key members of the team.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Yes. You know, I've got a couple of camera operators that.
Very good handheld operators. And so if I've got a student that has shown some promise on, say, soccer or volleyball, running a camera, I may say, hey, you're gonna. You're gonna grip for this camera op for the next two or three games.
And I just want you to just observe, soak up what they do, ask them questions about why they do it. And what I found is if you get a student that is really interested and wants to learn and wants to get Better. And you send them around with one of these pro guys, they pick it up. They pick it up very, very quickly. And we are lucky in the sense of the professionals that work up here.
And it's kind of a requirement for me to hire somebody from Denver or Foco or Boulder.
You have to be willing to teach. And these guys are willing to teach and they're willing to train because I think they understand that, you know, these kids are the future of our business and somebody's got to teach them.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: So whenever we discuss things being cost effective or value engineered, one of the first things that always pops up is Remy. Right. It's a key part of making sports production more cost effective. So how does Remy fit in your workflow and where has it helped you the most?
[00:24:59] Speaker A: We do quite a bit of Remy, not only for Wyoming events, but for Mountain west events.
I would say the really every broadcast we do is a Remy because you're not in a truck in the stadium with everything direct connected to it. All of our cameras run back through fiber.
All of the stuff that's in the facilities runs back through fiber or over the network.
So really everything we do is a Remy because we have two centralized control rooms.
But in terms of true, true, like really off site Remy, we've dabbled in remote announcers over the years. We do that for soccer. Our soccer press box, there's two reasons that we do it for soccer. Our soccer press box is very small and there's not really room for announcers in there.
Two, we don't have lights at our soccer stadium.
So your games are being played at three or four o' clock in the afternoon during the week, which, you know, when it's a weekend, you can get somebody from Denver up here.
Most of these guys have day jobs, so it's hard for them when you think about it. Call time is two hours before, so they're, they're leaving at 10 or 11am to get up here for a 3 o' clock soccer game. That doesn't work for most of our announcers. So what we found there is we're able to something as simple as a zoom call, we're able to put them on a zoom call.
It works because the local person in the control room, the producer, you don't hear their voice go out over the call.
So we just open a zoom call. They can do IFB that way.
We send them the program feed into Zoom over NDI and we take their voices out via Dante virtual sound card into our Ellen and Heath mixer. So it's made it very, very easy to find announcers for a sport that quite frankly, we struggled finding announcers for.
And so that's one way we do it. The other way that we've done a lot of Remy production is we work with the Mountain West a lot, the conference office, to help stream a bunch of their championships.
And we have used TVU for that. So Brian Tripp, the associate commissioner for broadcast down at down in Las Vegas now, not Colorado Springs anymore. Brian has one end of a TVU RPS system that he takes around and that's a six in and two out. I have the six out, two in and plugged into our router in our main control room. So he can send me six and I can send program and preview back or I can send program and a producer ISO back for him. And they're able, they, they embed all the audio on the camera feeds and we're able to de embed it and send it where it needs to go. And we've been able to do a lot of their championships over the past three, four years that way.
[00:27:53] Speaker C: So if we switch gears to monetization and ott, we see a lot of these newer technology upgrades require funding from one source or another. And a lot of times that comes from monetization.
But also because that does offset the
[00:28:07] Speaker B: cost, you do get cost savings.
[00:28:09] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:09] Speaker B: So what is Wyoming doing to build
[00:28:11] Speaker C: revenue streams through OT live events and on demand content?
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Well, the first thing is more on a conference wide level. The Mountain West Network had previously.
It lasted 13 years.
It started actually the same year I got to Wyoming. So I kind of was there for the entire existence of the previous version of the Mountain West Network. But it was free.
Everything was free on it. Over a thousand events a year. Well, with, you know, obviously as you said, revenue generation has become a very, you know, hot hot topic in, in in college athletics.
So they are, they just launched on July 1st, it's called Mountain West Plus. That's the 2.0 of the Mountain west network, if you will.
And it's behind a paywall. So that is one way that we are starting to generate revenue.
And then the nice thing about that is the way they have it set up is I believe 60% of the revenue that is brought in from the app goes back to the schools.
So it's a good way for the schools to make some revenue there. The other way we do it on our streams is the schools get a certain allocation of commercials in the ad spots in the commercial breaks. And our Learfield group here sells those, and they've sold a lot of them over the years.
And then in game features as well, we'll sell starting lineups, we'll sell first half stats, first half highlights, play of the game, player of the game. And these are all things that we just build into our broadcast format and we activate them as the game goes on.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: Well, Dennis, this has been just a
[00:29:48] Speaker C: tremendous deluge of information and we've got some question and answers.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Can you stick around a few minutes and take some questions from our audience? Sure.
[00:29:57] Speaker C: Excellent.
[00:29:58] Speaker B: Thanks for watching.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: Broadcast to post don't forget to follow Keycode Media on social and contact us about your
[email protected].
