During the annual KLPS 24-Hour Telethon I was given a day's notice that we would be broadcasting Liberty High School's make up baseball game against Park Hill South to help fill a portion of the programming schedule. I had already planned to use our broadcast truck to transmit video from a second gym where legacy analog video lines were too long to transmit HD back to our studio. I had already tested wether we could use NDI as in input to our studio VMix to connect the broadcast truck.
It rained on the day of the day of the game. Instead of running a long camera mult from the truck, which was parked near the left field fence, Jeff Knold put a Teradek Bolt wireless HD transmitter on our JVC camera in the outfield (shown above).
Below, the back dock of the cafeteria offers the best place for an outfield camera. The back dock has the necessary elevation and electricity only 20 feet away. The cable run for a camera mult is fairly significant, but with line of site wireless transmitters we saved a significant amount of time setting up the camera and avoided a messing clean up caused by wet cabling.
Looking over the shoulder of the outfield camera operator, you can see the white broadcast production truck where games are produced for Liberty Public Schools.
Below, the Teradek Bolt receiver is elevated to about 13 feet on a c-stand in order to receive the outfield camera's signal. An HD-SDI cable connects the receiver to the production truck.
Liberty High School's baseball field wasn't built with video production in mind. As a result, there aren't positions inside the fence. Broadcasting students have used hydraulic lifts as a camera platform in the past. However, the school district no longer supports that.
I inquired with the athletic director about setting up a camera on the roof of the dugout, but after doing a site visit I realized the metal dugout roof was going to be too steep. I stopped by Dennis Blochlinger's wood shop classroom to ask whether he had an ideas. Blochlinger recommended using a gator. As a result I sent an emailed Steve Aldrich, director of Liberty Public Schools facilities and grounds, to see whether he had scaffolding, a gator or a pickup truck we could park near the fence. Aldrich passed along my email to Justin with the athletic grounds crew. Justin was able to find this golfcart which put our camera in a fantastic position behind third base (below).
Liberty North High School students Brock Gorton and Yin Brown who were participating in the annual 24-hour telethon announce the baseball game not far from the camera position near third base. The broadcast production truck visible in the background is parked strategically to use electrical outlets on the backside of the new fieldhouse at Liberty High School.
The red pickup (visible in the top right corner of the photo above) was where I used an Engenius wireless bridge to connect the broadcast production truck VMix to the the school's network (below). Technology specialist Curt Laven has configured three sets of Engenius transmitters/receiver pairs so the broadcast production truck will be able to connect wirelessly to multiple locations across the school district.
The broadcast production truck's Engenius wireless bridge is elevated above my Scion so it can connect to the building side transmitter more than 50 feet away.
Jeff Knold, video production specialist from Niles Media Group, took over switching after a student's shift ended during the annual KLPS 24-Hour telethon (below).
In conclusion: This baseball game was a great experience as Jeff and I had produced a baseball game just two days before at Liberty North High School where there's ample electricity and camera positions near the two dugouts. However, we weren't able to get an outfield camera that day and all of the cameras were on camera mults that day.
We learned from this experience that the Engenius bridges don't have enough bandwidth for sports production using NDI.
I have several ideas about how we might connect to the school's network and produce live sporting events without the dropped frames or stutter we saw on the KLHS studio VMix during the baseball game.
Plan 1 - Connect the truck directly to the school's network using a long ethernet cable. The length of the cable would likely be at least 150 feet.
Plan 2 - Stream from VMix to ShadowTools. Then add the RTMP stream to the KLHS studio VMix for broadcast on Channel 18.
Plan 3 - Stream from the truck using a Vidiu box connected to either the VMix or the HDMI output of the KiPro. *Just a week prior we produced a one-camera soccer game using a Vidiu box and the Engenius bridges to connect the streaming box to a receiver in the library. The connection didn't suffer from the dropped frame or jitter we experienced during the baseball game. I used the Vidiu box about a year before to stream a JV football game. During the recent soccer game I happened to notice that the now finished fieldhouse is closer and there aren't trees blocking the line of site to the second story hospitality room where there's ethernet.
Plan 4 - Set up the broadcast production truck VMix job as 720p and try using NDI same as before.
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