Creative Media Solutions’ presence at the U.S. Open continues to expand as the team at Fox Sports finds new ways to leverage their expertise and capabilities. “We started out with building out normal editing stations and now it has expanded into networks and IP connectivity,” says Noah Gusdorff, Creative Media Solutions (CMSI), founder and CEO.
Noah Gusdorff with one of the Cisco 10 Gbps switches that are in use at the U.S. Open.
The core of CMSI’s activities are in Game Creek Video’s Edit 2 trailer. It is there that CMSI oversees five Adobe Premier editing suites (one with DaVinci Resolve for color correction), HP transcoding servers, 256 TB of Avid ISIS storage, and another 86 TB of 10 GB NAS storage. It also has a voice over booth, handles iso recording for both Fox and the USGA, and has 10 Gbps Cisco network core that in some respects is the core of all of Fox activities across the event.
“Last year we took on IT distribution as AT&T and Level handed off all of the bandwidth to us,” says Gusdorff. “We have a core sitting here and we treat every truck and vendor as a client where they can each request bandwidth and then we shave them off exclusive bandwidth.”
This year CMSI is also supplying 11 Cisco field kits that are distributed around the course, connect to the Cisco core, and provide the wired and wireless access the Fox Sports production team and related vendors will need. Cisco switches on all 18 tee boxes also send the TopTracer and ShotTracker ball data from the course to the Fox Technology trailer.
“We have eliminated media converters on the course, points of failure, and can monitor the network 24/7,” adds Gusdorff. “We have three people monitoring it during the day and one at night.”
The CMSI team also has access to nine EVS IP Directors via KVM so that producers can pull any EVS clips they need and then send them to edit machines or even transfer them to the Fox Sports facility in Pico via high-speed file transfer. There is also a connection to the Big 10 Network so that anything cut here can be put into the feature group coverage.
“There are just tons of connectivity all over the place,” says Gusdorff.
Another important task is helping offload content from the EVS servers since there is not enough storage space to keep an archive of content from previous rounds.
“We’re iso recording onto one of our servers and then anyone can find footage from the previous day for packages,” explains Gusdorff. “And two media managers here also get all of the ENG footage into the ecosystem so that the editors in Pico can call them and get the footage they need. And on top of that the Pico team is getting a mini-melt of the best 20 minutes of content each day.”
From sportsvideo.org
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