Fox Sports is a topic of conversation at the Pronology stand as the company provided its complete set of asset management tools to handle the broadcaster’s FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015 coverage.
With a US Women’s National Team victory fresh in the record books, and record ratings for the network, Fox Sports wrapped its ambitious agenda for the month-long coverage of soccer’s premier women’s event, which featured 24 teams, spanned six cities and five time zones.
In order to give producers and editors instant access to the media needed to cover an event of this magnitude, regardless of their location, Pronology was on the case with its media-centric workflow systems.
Fox Sports built two large-scale temporary broadcast compounds in Vancouver to cover this event in the best possible fashion. The studio, which included a control room and playback area built in scenic Jack Poole Plaza, and a transmission centre, co-located with FIFA’s International Broadcast Coordination Center.
All editing staff and associated infrastructure were located in Los Angeles. The edit workload was large enough to require two separate locations; the Fox Pico facility and J/Kam in Burbank, each with dedicated storage.
With Pronology serving as the backbone of the system, all users had immediate access to proxy files for viewing and logging, whatever the location of the high res media. For example, when 4K content was shot and imported in Vancouver, it could immediately be viewed and logged in LA.
Kevin Callahan, director of remote operations for Fox Sports, said, “Pronology was our Swiss Army knife, able to solve multiple issues confronting us. There were a lot of moving parts to this operation. Many of our production staff had no idea of the size and complexity of what went on behind the scenes, which was the goal. We wanted a setup where they clicked on an asset, they could view a proxy and their content would get from wherever it was, to wherever it needed to go. Pronology was able to provide this for us.”
Michael Shore, co-founder of Pronology, added, “We worked very hard to simplify what could easily have become an overwhelming project from a production perspective. In one month’s time we managed 300 users, 250,000 individual files, more than 500 TB of media, 75,000 workflows, 10,000 sub clips and more than 1000 user bins. We created and supported an enterprise level system, integrated into the Fox network and architected more than 30 multi-step workflows, all in just a few short weeks. We are very proud of our accomplishments on this event.”
