Three Computers, Two Keyboards, One Show: The Replay Operator at BCC Live
One of our most high-profile jobs here at BCC Live is the production of all the broadcasts for the IRONMAN Group’s triathlons worldwide. Every event that goes out on TV or on streaming services goes through us first. And we’re honored to be a part of it! Today, we’re going to be talking about The Replay Operator!
Specifically, what we do is take camera feeds (either from our own team on the ground or from one of IRONMAN’s other production partners) and add graphics, bring in commentary from our announcers in our studio, insert commercials, and add in additional content to give the show extra life… All this happens before we send it onwards to a whole bevy of streaming services.
If you know anything about an IRONMAN or IRONMAN 70.3 triathlon… You know one thing: it’s a long distance and a lot of time. It’s a huge time investment just to sit down and watch one take place! To make the broadcasts more digestible and give people the highlights after the fact, we create and run replays during the broadcast to get people up to speed.
And that’s where our replay operators come in. During IRONMAN broadcasts, we have one replay operator. While the rest of our team is working on switching cameras, mixing audio, and making the show run smoothly and on time, one key person at the replay desk creates videos from our show… Among other things. Dive in with me to a breakdown of the workflow at this station. I’ll show you what the replay operator does in a typical broadcast!
First, Let’s Have a Look at our Replay Desk.
On the far right here are the monitors and dedicated control surface for our 3Play 3P2. This is a dedicated system by NewTek (now Vizrt) designed for instant replays in sports broadcasting—how convenient! Though it’s primarily intended to be used for quick highlights (like replaying a notable pass)… We use it for far more. Our 3Play is working hard all the way through the show to turn out fresh content. The replay operator spends most of their time on this machine… But more on that later.
In the middle is the TalkShow VS-100’s display. This is another piece of NewTek/Vizrt hardware. It serves a single purpose: bringing in remote callers over Skype to include on the broadcast. As you can see, the replay operator has other responsibilities as well!
And off to the left of this image is my laptop… In addition to holding a copy of the script and monitoring our chat on Microsoft Teams with remote team members, this also controls Grabyo. Grabyo is a separate replay and video production system to the 3Play. Why do we need two of those? Well, I’ll get into that!
Two Replay, Two Hands
What’s the point of having the 3Play and Grabyo running at the same time to generate content? Well, each has its strengths and weaknesses—and they send video to different places!
Grabyo, a web-based service, receives a single stream from our studio. The straightforward interface is designed by the system to take single clips from a stream and save them to cloud-based servers. From there, those clips can be downloaded or posted directly to linked social networks. It’s meant to be a quick and versatile tool to get posts based on a livestream out to your followers. If you’ve seen moments from an IRONMAN broadcast posted on their social media while the broadcast was going on… They came from Grabyo!
But it’s not a do-all service. For one, the fact that Grabyo receives only a single stream means that the content it receives is relatively limited. It’s always getting video from the “program” feed and audio from our commentators. For another, the “live clipping” service described above can create clips just as precisely as the 3Play. But editing clips together to make a longer video is a separate service on Grabyo… We don’t really have the time for one operator to switch between the two during a show!
Edit, Edit, Edit
Meanwhile, the 3Play has some considerable editing power—more than you really need for instant replays! It can pull in up to eight feeds simultaneously that can be switched through on demand. It can add music and transitions, edit using keyframes, and build out playlists of clips that can be exported out as full and robust videos to use as you please.
It’s not too shy of a full non-linear editing system like Premiere or Final Cut! So, the power is in your hands to make videos that look exactly how you want them to. What’s more, the 3Play is designed to interface with the TriCaster that serves as the main switcher for our broadcasts. This makes it a snap to pull clips and playlists from the 3Play to play on the live broadcast.
However, the 3Play has its idiosyncrasies. If you make a playlist of clips and want to export that as a video to use somewhere other than the TriCaster, you have to wait until you’ve stopped recording to do so. Which means you wouldn’t be able to grab clips of other events while exporting. Not ideal for a live production where anything can happen! And even if you could export while recording… The only option is to create a file you would need to pull onto a separate computer to use during a production. There are built-in settings to export directly to various social media sites. Updates to the sites have made them all non-functional.
Export Them Out!
So, the 3Play’s role is to make more well-produced and longer videos during the broadcast that are either played back on the broadcast through the TriCaster or exported for use after the show. We primarily use it for creating “what you’ve missed so far” videos and highlight reels. We play these during and after the broadcast.
Exporting and posting these videos after the race is over isn’t ideal… But it’s still faster than having an editor download the whole show to edit after the fact! Meanwhile, the Grabyo feed creates social-media-ready clips that are relatively basic. But they can be online just seconds after a notable moment takes place. And it’s the replay operator’s job to run both systems! Luckily, both Grabyo and the 3Play are relatively easy to use when you get into a groove… So the task of operating two replay systems simultaneously isn’t as difficult as one might think. But it sure looks impressive to an outside observer!
A Day in the Life of a Replay Operator
Let’s run through a typical broadcast experience for me as the replay operator. My day begins about an hour before the show starts. I log in to the various pieces of hardware and make sure that everything is running smoothly and receiving signal. From then until showtime, it’s all just preparation… Reviewing the script, checking the incoming and outgoing feeds to see that they have live video. And making sure the rest of the team has everything they need.
Also on my desk are a couple cheat sheets I’ve written up beforehand. I write out the broad strokes of the race schedule in our time zone, so I don’t miss any important cues coming up on the clock. The other is a list of the notable pro athletes competing in the race that day… With their bib number and (once I spot them) what their race gear looks like. Pro triathletes can often look very similar. So, it pays to know who you’re looking at when it comes to putting together videos in a pinch!
It’s Almost Time…
Not long before the broadcast starts, everyone in the studio starts recording the show on a myriad of different devices for safety. When the 3Play starts recording, it’s ready to start making clips for the broadcast, so it’s good to start as soon as solid footage is coming in from the ground team—but the recording of a full triathlon takes up a lot of space, so I must make sure there’s up to a terabyte of free space on the 3Play’s drives first!
Once the show starts going, everything falls into a familiar rhythm. The TriCaster operator starts switching the show, pulling up graphics and switching between viewpoints as the announcers introduce the region and the featured athletes. I’m grabbing clips on Grabyo of the start line and the top competitors—those are always a hit on social media—and filling up my “pre-race” clip list on the 3Play with nice scenic shots to establish the race in the videos I start cutting together.
Go Time!
Then the gun goes off, the athletes are in the water, and we’re going at a breakneck pace—there’s lots to talk about right at the start, it’s hard to tell who’s who, and every athlete is jockeying for position. The clip list on the 3Play grows longer and longer as I try to snag picturesque shots of every athlete in the field (you never know who might end up on the podium, after all), match names to faces, and keep track of who’s leading and who’s falling behind.
Moreso than anyone else in the studio, my job is to keep an extremely close eye on the progress of the race. It’s easy for a critical pass to go by in the blink of an eye, or even not show up on the broadcast, so you don’t want to be making clips and videos wrongly assuming someone is in the lead. Tracking the leaders, the passes, and any difficulties that may transpire on the course makes it that much easier to tell the story in the short videos that are being built out on the 3Play—some of them need to recap the whole race in just 90 seconds!
It’s challenging to receive terrific footage from our team on the ground and cut out so much of it for the sake of these highlight videos, but that’s the cost of telling a good story.
Watch, Clip, Edit, Repeat
If there’s a lull in the action, that’s a great opportunity to get returning viewers caught up on the story so far. I build out a rolling “let’s get caught up” video that’s ready to play by the time the athletes are out on the bike course, and with just a few clicks the TriCaster operator can import that video to play out on the air in seconds.
We also often try to have individual recaps of the swim, bike, and run, in the event the studio announcers want to look back on a specific leg of the triathlon. I must work quickly to get these ready for action and let the TriCaster operator know they’re good to go, as they could get played at any moment.
Stay the Course
All while this is going on, I’m calling up remote guests on the TalkShow so they can weigh in with their thoughts on the race, picking out picturesque or funny moments to clip on Grabyo for social media, making sure we have clips of sponsored segments, and watching the leaderboard to see if any major passes took place off-camera. It’s a lot to do all at once, especially for upwards of nine hours!
But all things come to an end in time. Once the top three men and women cross the finish line, we enter the closing segment of the show. We interview the top three athletes, run a podium ceremony, discuss the scoreboards with the announcers, and then… We close the show with one more video from the 3Play: we set the 90-second recap mentioned earlier to music and end the show on a high note. The end slate comes up, the streams stop, and I breathe a sigh of relief…
Show’s Over…
…And then start exporting all the videos I made throughout the day! Having a quick turnaround on the content we make during the race is one of our strengths, so there’s no time to lose. This is also the time for one last watch-through to make sure every edit is as good as it can be and every video follows the full story of the race, showing the top finishers throughout the race to highlight their story.
Before too long, every video is offloaded from the 3Play and begins uploading to Vimeo for distribution. By the time the rest of the team shuts down their gear and chats with the announcers about how the race went, I’m getting ready to send off the videos and start downloading a full copy of the show from Grabyo to hang on to for later. In just a few short minutes, IRONMAN has full highlight reels to tell the story of the day, we have all the footage we need for a longer cutdown for syndication, and we’re all ready to go home. It seems like it flies by!
At BCC Live, running the replay desk is a constant juggling act of managing different systems and services while picking out all the best moments that make triathlon so interesting. It might feel overwhelming sometimes when everything’s happening at once, but getting to watch athletes perform at their peak while you sit at the epicenter of a major broadcast production never gets old. I love it every time—and I hope you love the videos you get to see of it!
