Luckily for us, only the athletes were required to wear leotards.
CMSI recently supported ESPN’s coverage of the NCAA Gymnastics Semifinals and Championships, providing workflow, edit, and HDR support throughout the event. Working alongside production and engineering teams, CMSI helped ensure that media moved efficiently from capture through postproduction and delivery.
Supporting End-to-End Workflows
For this event, CMSI supported a range of production workflows to help ESPN manage media across multiple stages of the broadcast process. This included file transport and delivery, media management, and integration across systems used by production and postproduction teams.
ESPN also leveraged CMSI’s cloud infrastructure to enable efficient movement of content between on-site operations and remote teams. This allowed footage to be accessed, edited, and prepared for distribution without delays, even under the tight timelines of live competition. If you’ve ever been to a gymnastics event, you know there’s almost too much going on at once. No room for errors, on the floor or in the truck.
EVS Integration and IPDirector
A key component of the workflow was the integration of EVS systems, which played a central role in capturing and managing live event content. CMSI supported the use of IPDirector, EVS’s production asset management platform, to help organize, access, and move media throughout the production environment.
IPDirector enables production teams to quickly locate and retrieve clips, coordinate across departments, and ensure that content is readily available for replay, editing, and distribution. Its integration into the broader workflow helps streamline communication between teams and maintain consistency across the production pipeline.
Delivering HDR and Postproduction Support
CMSI also provided HDR support for the event, helping ensure that video color space and quality met the expectations of modern broadcast and streaming platforms. Managing HDR in a live production environment requires coordination across multiple systems and vendors, and CMSI’s team worked to maintain consistency throughout the workflow.
In addition, CMSI supported editing workflows, enabling quick turnaround on highlight content and other deliverables. With multiple routines and storylines unfolding simultaneously, the ability to process and deliver content efficiently was critical to the overall production.
Behind the Scenes of Live Competition
While viewers enjoyed watching a lot of complex beam routines through a seamless broadcast, CMSI and ESPN put a lot of work in behind the scenes. CMSI’s involvement helped ensure that media was captured, managed, and delivered without interruption, supporting ESPN’s ability to present the NCAA Gymnastics Championships to audiences across broadcast and digital platforms. While we’re no Simone Biles or Stephen Nedoroscik, we’re looking forward to getting back on the pommel horse next year.
