At-Home Production (REMI) using Cellular & the Public Internet
Maintain Frame-accurate Genlock and Lip Sync across Multiple Handheld Cameras for Your Live Remote Production

Ken Kerschbaumer (00:05):
Hi everyone. And welcome to our first panel discussion of the day. Obviously our goal with this event is
talking about remote production. But we want to take a little bit of a different angle to talk more about
what life is like for people at home. And then recommendations for people who are working in new
ways the last seven months. So it’s great to be joined by Jim Jachetta, who is VidOvation CTO and cofounder.
Jim, how are you?
Jim Jachetta (00:24):
Good. How are you, Ken? Thanks for having us.
Ken Kerschbaumer (00:27):
Glad to have you. And James Japhet from Hawk-Eye North America, managing director. How are you,
James?
James Japhet (00:32):
I’m pretty well, Ken. Yourself?
Ken Kerschbaumer (00:33):
I’m doing all right. So we must start with James, you are in the Appalachians, I believe. Which I’m
amazed you have even a wifi and connectivity down there. It’s great.
James Japhet (00:43):
Yeah, it’s a plus. Yeah, no, it’s a welcome change from the city. So yeah, no complaints from my end.
Ken Kerschbaumer (00:51):
Yeah, sure. And I guess that gets to one of the key challenges we want to talk about today, which is,
people are working from new places, right? And places where you maybe wouldn’t think you would be
able to do a video production. So from your standpoint, because I know Hawk-Eye, Josh was on the
previous panel discussion discussing his working from home. So give us a sense of what the last seven
months meant for Hawk-Eye. Because I know you guys have been key for a lot of the PGA golf events.
What’s it been like for you and your team as far as this new normal, if you will?
James Japhet (01:20):
Yeah. I mean, the first half it was very quiet and the second half has been pretty busy. It’s been an
interesting time. I mean, it actually threatened to tip just before COVID hit with the work we were doing
with the PGA players, with their every shot live project. But it’s been interesting. We’ve taken a very
different approach to most with regards to remote production and the replay side of it, choosing to
leave all of the high res actually on site and simply almost creating a portal into that. So yeah, we’re very
low bandwidth. As a solution which, as you say, even in the Appalachians I’ve got half a chance.
Ken Kerschbaumer (02:04):
Right, right, right. Well actually, I do want to start with the players. Because that was, without a doubt, I
got to watch about what five hours, six hours of the cool every shot, every whole live. Give me a walk
through it real quick, because your operators were based in the UK. So maybe that’s a perfect example
of this new workflow in terms of, how was that accomplished? How many people, is it 20, 18, 22
operators? How many were in UK? I’m quizzing you now.
James Japhet (02:32):
Yeah. Close. We had 28 actually. But yeah, effectively we had all our servers onsite in Florida capturing
every single angle on the course. So 120 plus angles coming into the system. And effectively we are
producing 25 concurrent streams, one for every group that was on the course. It actually crept up to 27
or 28 at one point, just because of a bit of slow play. But yeah, effectively we were curating a stream for
[inaudible 00:03:04] groups. So cutting graphics, TrackMan integration for the PGA’s nonlinear
broadcasters around the globe.
Ken Kerschbaumer (03:14):
Yeah. It was amazing. It was really good.