Boston College Athletics Beefs Up Live Broadcasts
Boston College's athletic department has upgraded its control room with a new video control center. The new system broadcasts scoreboard presentations during basketball and hockey games, held at the school's indoor arena, Conte Forum, as well as football games at Alumni Stadium.
Boston College installed Broadcast Pix's Granite 2000 Video Control Center in the control room at Conte Forum last fall. The unit replaced the Broadcast Pix Slate 1000 the department had been using over the last three years and comes with new options and a larger control panel, according to Eric Girard, associate director of interactive media for the Boston College Athletics Department. "The ability to see more on those panels is a huge plus," Girard said in a prepared statement from Broadcast Pix.
The average football production requires up to four cameras while basketball and hockey can use as many as five. Gerard said that the production team will use video feeds from production trucks covering the games.
The department uses Granite's Fluent Rapid CG 2 feature to update scores during hockey and basketball games. The option is designed to automate the production of customized graphics by linking the CG to a database, RSS feed, custom action buttons, Daktronics Scoreboard controller, or news system. The school does not use this feature for its football games because the "stadium’s video boards are positioned on top of separate scoreboards," according to the statement.
Granite's Fluent Watch-Folders feature allows producers to store and access production graphics during a live event. The team uses the system's Fluent Macro function to create a "consistent look for replays, sponsorship bugs, score tickers, and other on-screen graphics and transitions." The system has nearly 800 stored macros, said Gerard, of which up to 100 are used for a single game.
Additional information about the video production system can be found at Broadcast Pix Web site.
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Kanoe Namahoe is online editor for 1105 Media's Education Group. She can be reached at [email protected].