Bannister Lake announced today that Alain Savoie, the company’s creative and technical director, will be presenting his co-authored white paper, “New Methodologies in Real-Time Data Aggregation and Management for Broadcast Presentation and Distribution” at the 2019 NAB Show. Along with Savoie, the paper was written by Bannister Lake’s Vernon Freedlander who heads strategic partnerships and the company’s president, Georg Hentsch. The presentation takes place on Wednesday, April 10 at 4 p.m. at the Las Vegas Convention Center room N260.
Live data, its management and visualization, have become an integral part of the broadcast and visual communications workflow. Whether used in fast-moving, dynamic on-air presentations such as elections, news, sports, eSports, or finance, or to populate and control on-air branding, effective live-data aggregation and management drives efficiencies and creates new monetization possibilities. As broadcasters seek out new revenue streams, live data plays a key role both online and in developing new markets such as streaming and digital signage.
Savoie will be speaking on several important data-related topics that directly impact the broadcast industry. The presentation will focus on unique data-driven engineering and development methodologies, and how broadcasters can take advantage of the data aggregation and management tools and techniques these methodologies foster to create more efficient and automated production workflows. Savoie will also explore how broadcasters can utilize real-time data to create and distribute new revenue-generating products and services. Savoie will use examples from broadcast, eSports, and event signage to illustrate.
Savoie is an industry authority on live-data-driven graphics. He has worked on numerous high-profile broadcast projects integrating data into innovative graphic solutions. At Bannister Lake he is responsible for integrating data feed content into Bannister Lake’s data aggregation and management technology suite and in turn outputting data to on-air graphic systems throughout the broadcast and event ecosystem. Savoie works directly with engineers, designers, editorial teams, and event producers offering training, commissioning, graphic operations, and consultation to meet any data and technical requirement within the production and graphic display workflow.
At the 2019 NAB Show Bannister Lake will be highlighting its flagship data aggregation and graphics management solution, Chameleon. Chameleon provides networks and station groups with unparalleled data aggregation, graphics management, and visualization possibilities. Beyond broadcast, the Chameleon solution is used in multiple data applications: OTT, streaming, digital signage, HTML5, online, and mobile. Chameleon reads, ingests, and manages multiple, diverse data feeds through an advanced web interface, providing users with full control over incoming data. Users can edit, moderate, blend, and manage datasets to generate completely customizable and automated tickers, L-bars, full frame graphics, and branding elements.
Be sure to visit Bannister Lake at the 2019 NAB Show, Booth SL5616.
Bannister Lake’s industry-leading data and graphics management solution, Chameleon, will be in the spotlight at the 2019 NAB Show with a focus on the product’s new election, sponsorship, and security functionality.
As broadcasters start planning for the 2020 presidential election, Chameleon boasts improvements to its election race modules, providing producers with more options to ingest and manage result data feeds, referendums, propositions, and acclaimed candidates.
The latest release highlights Chameleon’s ability to drive online, mobile, and social media election experiences by feeding data to web widgets and automatically sending out tweets based on Chameleon data conditions. These exciting features allow producers to utilize Chameleon data to visualize election results interactively, presenting innovative new storytelling possibilities.
A new and improved sponsor module tracks and connects campaigns to specific sponsors, making as-run logging clearer and better defined. Chameleon also includes enhanced security features aligned with NIST guidelines with improved password protection.
Bannister Lake has also focused a great deal of attention on social media, enhancing Chameleon’s Twitter search capabilities and improving the product’s media module, introducing bins for organizing content and the enablement of multi-file uploads.
Product demonstrations will feature projects focused on Bannister Lake’s recent work in elections, eSports, and event signage.
At NAB, Bannister Lake will also be introducing a new version of its Chameleon NDI player, providing NDI users with the ability to fully manage and visualize live data feeds. NDI users will be able to integrate, moderate, and customize multiple live data feeds into graphic templates and provide their audiences with real-time news, weather, sports, social media, financial, and customized data.
As part of NAB’s Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference (BEITC), Al Savoie, Bannister Lake’s creative and technical director, will be presenting his co-authored whitepaper “New Methodologies in Real-Time Data Aggregation and Management for Broadcast Presentation and Distribution.” The interactive session will explore Bannister Lake’s unique approach to data aggregation and feature production examples from both broadcast and eSports. Savoie’s presentation takes place on April 10 at 4 p.m. at the Las Vegas Convention Center room N260.
In addition, NAB attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about Bannister Lake’s Zeus media storage and playout solution. Perfect for image- and clip-intensive production environments, Zeus provides producers with easy and immediate access to content. It is an ideal solution for home shopping channels, entertainment programs, news, sports productions, and any situation where high volume, quick turnaround, and unpredictability of clip and image requirements must be carefully managed. With minimum custom development, Zeus can be fully integrated with popular MAM systems, providing broadcasters with access to vast libraries of clip and image content.
Be sure to visit Bannister Lake at the 2019 NAB Show, Booth SL5616.
Bannister Lake announced today that its data aggregation and management solution, Chameleon, is now capable of outputting 4K UHD video over IP video networks. The solution was recently showcased at the InterBEE exhibition in Japan using Visionary Solutions’ PacketAV 4K DUET encoder and decoders.
Visionary Solutions’ PacketAV 4K video over IP encoders and decoders solve the transportation issues common with non-IP cabling solutions, allowing Chameleon graphics to play back smoothly on 4K monitors in any location.
“We are thrilled to see Chameleon successfully operational in a 4K over IP environment,” said Georg Hentsch, President, Bannister Lake. “This marks an important milestone as we continue to build on years of consistent innovation and presents a data and graphics management solution that performs exceptionally well in any resolution and in any broadcast environment.”
“I love how clients marvel at the simplicity and efficiency of this system,” said Doug Strable, sales representative for Bannister Lake and Visionary Solutions products in Japan. “Chameleon’s web-based interface allows a non-technical user to update the information on all platforms, and the PacketAV DUET 4K encoders and decoders allow content to be displayed through a standard LAN network. The combined system is easy to set up, easy to maintain and easy to update.”
Chameleon graphics rendered to HTML5 were transported over a standard 1 Gigabyte network to multiple 4K video monitors with native 4K image quality, while maintaining its industry-leading data management functionality.
As the international broadcast industry continues to experiment and migrate to 4K over IP workflows, it is vitally important that graphics technologies keep pace with developments and support the trend. Similarly, the production community requires solutions that allows data content to be quickly repurposed to find value in a 4K environment.
Bannister Lake is an industry leader in data and graphics management, providing software and services for a broad range of broadcast and digital signage projects, including real-time election results, social media integration, financial, sports, news, and eSports.
Chameleon, Bannister Lake’s data aggregation and graphics management solution is introducing dramatic new enhancements with a strong focus on election data. Within its election module, Chameleon Version 10 improves how election data is ingested and managed. The new release expands the ability to enter manual election results where data feeds may not be available. This is particularly useful in less populated districts or in jurisdictions where it is not practical to organize a real-time results feed. The new functionality also provides an important failsafe in situations where a data feed may have stopped working.
In addition, Chameleon Version 10 dramatically improves the management of referendum and proposition results, providing editorial staff with more options for displaying down-ballot data. The election module also features improved management and filtering for acclaimed candidates.
“We realize that elections are more than just national events. These new features help ensure that broadcasters covering races in remote locations or in smaller communities can use data on-air more effectively,” said Bannister Lake’s President, Georg Hentsch.
The new release highlights Chameleon’s ability to feed data to web widgets, allowing producers to visualize data interactively online or on mobile devices. This feature drives new storytelling opportunities not only for elections, but also for news, sports and financial data. Bannister Lake is also introducing support for automatically sending out tweets based on Chameleon data conditions, enriching live data experiences on social media.
Chameleon Version 10 also provides improved sponsorship management, allowing users to manage campaign and client data more efficiently. The new and improved sponsor module tracks and connects campaigns to specific sponsors, making as-run logging clearer and better defined.
The new version of the product also includes enhanced security features aligned with NIST guidelines with improved password protection. Chameleon now offers clients an upgraded password strength checker and warns users when they are changing their password to a common password based on a list of the 1,000,000 most used passwords.
Version 10 also boosts Chameleon’s query functionality, its ability to filter custom data, introduces media bins for organizing media into containers and additional support for the onboard HTML5 designer tool.
Chameleon Version 10 is now available. Bannister Lake is dedicated to releasing new features and functionality several times a year to improve the capabilities of its software products.
Bannister Lake, the leading provider of professional broadcast data aggregation and visualization solutions, today announced that its Chameleon data aggregation and management software played an integral role in delivering editorial and graphic content for the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2018 Series. The tournament has quickly become one of the world’s most popular eSports events featuring the best Gran Turismo drivers. Chameleon was used during the championships run-ups in Salzburg, Madrid, and Las Vegas leading up to the world finals in Monaco that took place Nov. 16-18. In all, the tournament covered four international regions over a three-month period, ultimately reducing the field of hundreds of contestants down to 30 finalists.
In partnership with Montreal’s The Boombox Group, Bannister Lake provided the event’s data management solution populating graphics both in-venue and for the tournament’s web broadcasts. Chameleon was used to filter data coming from Google Sheets and organize data for each of the competition’s races. Chameleon also provided the event with tournament standings based on points and finish position and its BLADE RESTful API was used to reformat data content to make it readily available to graphics engines for display.
Bannister Lake has worked on numerous eSports and high-profile sporting events including the recent FIFA eWorld Cup™ 2018 and the 2018 US Open Tennis Championships. Both events used Chameleon to aggregate a wide variety of data content, moderate and manage content, and distribute it to various output channels.
“The FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships had its own unique challenges, but we were able to take full advantage of our production experience,” said Al Savoie, Bannister Lake’s technical and creative director who supervised data graphics integration onsite. “A great example of this is our ability to trigger specific graphics directly from the switcher to sync driver cameras, with their corresponding lower thirds. This gave the technical director the ability to go to three boxes at any time and have the correct name, flag, and manufacture of each of the drivers.”
Bannister Lake’s Chameleon has quickly become a popular choice for eSports production, providing a more engaging experience for fans while creating new revenue opportunities for event organizers. By aggregating and displaying multiple real-time data sources, it enables fans to receive added editorial information while allowing sponsors to generate more impressions.
The 2018 Gran Turismo World Championship concluded this weekend in Monaco, with a thrilling end to a 3 month, 4 region tournament showcasing the world’s best GT eSport drivers. 3 regional finals took place in Tokyo, Madrid and Las Vegas filtering the hundreds of competitors down to the top 30 players, competing for the first ever Nations Cup in Monte Carlo.
Boombox, our partner, also produced the eFifa 2018 World Championships, were again at the production helm, responsible for the on-air web broadcasts of the tournaments. Once again, Bannister Lake was called upon to assist with on-air graphics and data management. Polyphonic Digital Inc (PDI), the makers of the world famous game, assisted in providing data for the tournaments.
For Bannister, we had a few challenges that had to be overcome. With the experience from US Open and eFIFA, it made some of the challenges easier to overcome. On this project, I was the sole Xpression operator, operating 2 Xpressions, monitoring google sheets data, moderating 3 different formats of competition (semi-finals, Manufactures Series and the finals format) and playing out some of the in venue stage screens.
Dashboard, a Ross UI platform assisted in making things easier as some triggers required more than 1 graphic and output channel to be triggered in sync. We also linked PBus connection with the switcher, in order to sync driver cameras, with their lowerthirds. This gave the technical director the ability to go to 3 boxes at any time and have the correct name/flag/manufacture of each of the drivers.
Chameleon was once again used to filter some of the data coming from google sheets, and categorizing them for each of the competition formats, along with standings based on points and finish position.
It was a fun project. Considering we were using a European TV Production truck… it was amazing working on an English produced show, in a German truck with Dutch Engineers, Japanese clients, with a French production crew, produced in a Spanish, French and American country.
TJ Walker (Head of Production, Boombox) and William Robitaille (Director & TP, Boombox) testing out the game
Jay Zusko, Technical Director. Testing out the game.
Make shift control room in Las Vegas
Myself and Toyo-San Teramoto, from PDI, responsible for in-game stats
Kazunori Yamauchi, Head of Gran Turismo with Sarah Lemarchand, Producer for Boombox
Bannister Lake, the leading provider of professional broadcast data aggregation and visualization solutions, today announced that the company’s graphic integration services were used to generate key graphics for the special live election night broadcast of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Nov. 6. To help audiences visualize the unfolding results of the midterm elections, The Late Show’s production team turned to Bannister Lake to prepare and integrate graphics into the live broadcast that showed the House of Representatives and the Senate populated with the number of elected officials.
The Late Show used Google Sheets to tie data to the graphics and to manually make changes as required. During the election special, Bannister Lake’s role focused on transforming The Late Show’s creative graphic concepts into templates ready for playout. The graphic work was performed by Bannister Lake’s Creative and Technical Director Al Savoie, and data integration was carried out by The Late Show’s production staff.
“Bannister Lake has a long-standing relationship with key members of the graphics team at The Late Show and when we were asked to help out with its election coverage, we immediately said yes,” said Savoie. “We have done countless election broadcasts integrating data and graphics, but we’re especially honored to have been chosen by The Late Show’s team and take part of midterm election history.”
Bannister Lake provides software and services for managing and visualizing data for a broad range of projects including real-time election results, social media, financial information, sports, news, and weather. Bannister Lake’s flagship software solution, Chameleon, is the industry’s most advanced broadcast data engine that allows users to input any kind of data to populate and manage graphic templates. With Chameleon’s Google Sheets Custom Reader, media producers can automatically pull data content from Google Sheets cells and seamlessly populate graphic templates. In addition, producers are able to take full advantage of Google Sheets’ sharing capabilities, granting access and editing rights to multiple users contributing to the content. Data can be organized by topic and displayed using the Google Sheet tab, with Chameleon’s Google Sheets Custom Reader capable of handling multiple sheets and tabs for an efficient and elegant way to display complex broadcast graphics.
Bannister Lake is pleased to announce that it is partnering with Montreal-based broadcast design firm Motion Path to provide complete data visualization solutions for the broadcast and visual communications industry. Bannister Lake’s powerful data management software, custom development solutions, and implementation expertise combined with Motion Path’s award-winning graphic design capabilities creates exciting new storytelling efficiencies and possibilities for news and sports producers, station groups, event producers and digital signage networks.
Bannister Lake provides broadcasters with the industry’s most powerful automated live data management engine, allowing a wide variety of data formats to be parsed, edited, moderated and strategically distributed. Data appears on-air in the form of tickers, sports bugs, full frame graphics and branding elements. Motion Path has carved a unique niche in the broadcast and digital signage industries by providing graphic design services especially created for live data environments. By combining the two, Bannister Lake driven data will populate Motion Path graphics, delivering a powerful amalgamation of outstanding engineering, innovative production workflows and compelling design.
“Having a strong international design partner like Motion Path helps us add value and efficiency to clients who are seeking a flexible and powerful way to populate graphics with live data from any source,” said Georg Hentsch, president of Bannister Lake. “We had an excellent experience working together recently on the Ontario election with TFO and we look forward to working on many more data-rich projects together.”
“Bannister Lake’s data solutions will give our clients a straightforward way to manage complex data sets that will integrate beautifully into our designs,” said Anton Maximovsky, president of Motion Path. “Very often, data management was something our clients struggled with, needing to custom build a solution or had to compromise their expectations. By linking our graphics to Bannister Lake’s solutions, we have opened up many more creative possibilities for our clients.”
Both Bannister Lake and Motion Path are veteran election specialists and have provided broadcast clients with election race software systems and election graphics packages, respectively. Today’s partnership announcement will strengthen both companies’ election offerings and provide a complete end-to-end solution for election producers. The partnership also helps power Motion Path’s breakthrough work in virtual reality and augmented reality by incorporating Bannister Lake’s data tools to drive on-air presentations. Beyond elections, both companies look forward to providing innovative real-time visualization solutions for sports, financial news, events, eSports and digital signage.
Over three days and throughout three provinces, Canadians went to the polls to vote for mayor, city council, school trustee and several other municipal officials. In total there were over 1,400 individual races and thousands of candidates. Bannister Lake’s Chameleon software and its election module tracked all of them delivering live results to Global Television stations and websites in British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario.
Multiple data feeds were used to bring in results data on October 20 from British Columbia, October 22 from Ontario and October 24 from Manitoba. Results data poured in not just from large metropolitan areas such as Toronto and Vancouver but also from smaller remote communities.
“It’s the first time we’ve followed that many individual election races and such a high number of candidates. Chameleon handled it extremely well providing Global with real-time results. We were especially pleased we could ensure that results coming in from remote municipalities with slower data connections were fully optimized to be more efficient”, said George Hentsch, President, Bannister Lake.
Live election data ingested into Chameleon allowed production staff to follow races, create playlists and make calls. Global also used Chameleon’s BLADE RESTful API to populate graphics on-set using augmented reality systems and to feed web objects that provided online users with race results.
Bannister Lake provides broadcast editorial teams with the industry’s most versatile election results system. Chameleon software is managed via a web-based interface that allows an unlimited number of production and technical users access election results data. Teams can then integrate results into various election graphics templates, reformat data and redistribute it to other devices or production systems.
By Alain Savoie, Creative and Technical Director, Bannister Lake Software
The 2018 US Open celebrated its 50th year this season at the USTA Billie Jean National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, NY. Approximately 870 players took part in the two-week tournament which included 899 games played with over 700,000 spectators in attendance. Fans got a glimpse of their favorite tennis stars making history, including Naomi Osaka, the first Japanese player ever to win a Grand Slam singles championship and Novak Djokovic tying Pete Sampras’ record to become third among all-time Grand Slam champions.
While ESPN held the exclusive broadcast rights to the tournament, this was Van Wagner Sports and Entertainment’s (VWSE) sixth year of producing the video board and LED production for the main show courts & around the grounds. Marquee matches took place at the Arthur Ashe Stadium, alongside a full slate of daytime and evening matches inside the newly re-constructed Louis Armstrong Stadium and the intimate Grandstand Stadium. Van Wagner’s responsibilities included both in-stadium screen production for the 3 show courts, as well as the numerous grounds displays showcasing the matches on 16 televised courts throughout the facility.
On July 10th, approximately 5 weeks before the start of the tournament, Alain Savoie from Bannister Lake and J. Marty Dormany of The Academy of Lower Thirds were approached by Nate McCoart, Director of Technical Operations at VWSE Productions to produce a Ross Video XPression-based graphics package for the tournament.
VWSE is no stranger to XPression as they have deployed XPression Graphics Engines on numerous events over the past years, but this was their first implementation of XPression at the US Open.
“For a few years now we have been wanting to leverage XPression and the ability to render dynamic graphics in real-time for this particular project. We are thrilled that Alain was able to make that vision a reality with us this year and look forward to continuing our relationship with Bannister Lake and AcademyL3. Without an all-star team from the designers to the operators, we would never be able to make this happen, especially given the timeline and complex nature of the project.” – Nate McCoart, Director of Technical Operations at VWSE Productions.
The project also included data integration with SMT, the tournament’s data provider. The signage around the facility included standard 16×9 video displays, ribbon boards, a vertical tower screen and an 80 foot by 12 foot “Superwall” in the South Plaza outside Arthur Ashe Stadium. Having multiple displays with non-standard aspect ratios meant we needed to incorporate Ross’ new multi-display real-time graphics designer and controller, Tessera feature in XPression.
While in principle, creating a graphic package in 5 weeks is relatively do-able, it became far more complicated considering the tight turnaround and the method in which SMT was going to be providing data, which included different xml files sent every second that a matches’ statistical data was being updated (roughly 200,000 xml files), we needed a solution that could handle and filter the vast amounts of data, and in turn generate a simple API that multiple XPression systems could handle.
With production taking place in 3 separate stadiums as well as on the grounds, this data feed needed to incorporate a simple call up method for any possible matches. In addition, the XPression graphic scenes would have to accommodate the variations between Men’s Singles, Women’s Singles and Doubles. These requirements were extremely complex and required a mission-critical solution quickly.
“We knew Bannister Lake’s Chameleon could handle the complexity. It’s the industry’s most powerful engine for aggregating any data type and it’s the only way we could have pulled off the US Open project under the extreme time constrictions; that and all the hard work by Alain and the team.”- Georg Hentsch , President Bannister Lake.
Chameleon software has been used for years to create and automate broadcast tickers, primarily in the Canadian media market. Chameleon’s features include aggregating and moderating feeds such as news, weather, sports, traffic, financial, elections and social media data. Its specialty has always been to generate automated rundowns and output tickers for network television and digital signage. Only recently has Chameleon been utilized for event-based productions; most notably eSports tournaments which typically includes hundreds of matches played over a short amount of time with a large number of players.
Sound familiar?
Some graphic samples were sent to our team on July 26th, and we began receiving data from SMT on Aug 8th for testing, which meant we were able to create and test scenes and scenarios. Chameleon has tight integration with Ross XPression’s API, which meant, dealing with ticker elements such as matches in-progress/scheduled/completed, along with messaging and social media, were treated as broadcast tickers, as oppose to native sequence items. However, the pressing question was: Does Chameleon’s ticker support integration with Ross’s Tessera option? This has never been tested before.
We were thrilled to discover that not only does Chameleon support Tessera, it was relatively easy to create a display solution. With only 30 minutes of playing around with the feature, we were able to quickly build large formatted scenes, populated with Chameleon data, and generate large scaled tickers for venue and in-stadium signage.
“Working with VWSE, Alain Savoie has implemented the first XPression Tessera or Tessera SE project without Ross Video or one of our dealers assisting. Tessera was created to synchronize the outputs of multiple XPression engines together to create one massive display. The first project for XPression Tessera was over 21,000 pixels wide and used up to 12 channels. That can be intimidating, but Alain has done what we hoped others will; tried it and found out it isn’t as scary as it seems. Instead, it can be quite empowering.” – Patrick Twomey, Director of Xpression Product Marketing
The XPression scenes required style layouts that complimented the 5 set matches for men’s singles, the 3 set matches for women’s and other single events, and the double names for doubles matches. This was needed for both the ticker solutions and for the main screen broadcast. Therefore, on the automated ticker side, the layouts needed to change automatically, while on the main screen, the operators needed to guarantee the scenes were going to look correct, regardless of what matches were played. This meant the XPression scenes required a lot of Visual Logic, a feature that made it easy to program the different layouts in XPression.
Visual Logic screen shot
The manual main screens were also automated up to a point. Chameleon generated an XML URL, which included everything that we needed for every match during the tournament. Using some of XPression’s powerful scripting features, the entire graphics package would change based on the single MatchID SMT provided. By entering the match ID number into Ross Video’s Dashboard, it automatically transformed the scene layouts to accommodate the match type and populated the text fields and graphics for every aspect of the match, including player names, flags, headshots, scores, sets winners, challenges remaining and others. In some cases, the PlayerID generated from the MatchID, linked to player profile scenes which included their personal info such as place of birth, height, weight, handed and others.
Chameleon data
This workflow was significant for the post production process as well. In the past, editors and graphic designers had to work throughout the night to create the next day’s matchup graphics. Utilizing XPression powered by Chameleon’s data integration, everything was rendered in real-time. As a result, hundreds of graphic design and operator hours were saved during this years’ production.
The production was executed flawlessly without any graphic issues. We had a total of 7 XPressions running simultaneously with 15 output channels, displaying 15 different screen layout styles using Tessera. On four of the XPressions, Tessera was running as a single engine in order to call up full frame graphics and stadium fascias at the same time. Plus, we had 11 tickers running different content on different layouts as well.
“Because the Xpression project and the Bannister Lake data software was set up so well, it allowed us the flexibility to handle the workflow changes as they popped up. Because we had to trigger the fullscreen clips and fascia simultaneously, we had hotkeys all over the keyboard! That simple Xpression feature improved our workflow by letting us keep the focus in one place. I think the client was impressed with how smoothly everything went, including some last-minute changes on the fly.“ – Jeannemarie Tracey & Michelle Lippitt, New York based Xpression/Chyron Operators
The XPression templates were created with enough flexibility that CG operators had the choice between using linked data or manual entry or using Sequencer instead of Dashboard. The original concept was for the XPression scenes to be fully operational using Dashboard so that scenes and templates could be called up using a single button. However, the system had the flexibility to allow the 4 operators working on the project to use the operational workflow that worked best for them, all driven by the single MatchID.
Dashboard was used to trigger tickers for the place-based signage around the venues. In some cases, the vision switcher was also able to trigger the different ticker layouts for the South Plaza Superwall at the venue using Dashboard in combination with RossTalk commands.
Throughout the event we were also receiving closed caption data from VITAC, for both the Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong stadiums, connected via Datalinq. Our original idea was to have the Datalinq server at one location feed all the systems. Although in principle it was a good idea, it did create concerns if something were to happen to the data server. So instead, we had the Datalinqs spread to multiple locations. Closed captioning had its own Datalinq on a separate system. The Chameleon Datalinq was setup locally on every XPression. Social media and special 50th anniversary player data was on another Datalinq server.
Chameleon however, was installed locally on one of the backup XPressions, serving as the gateway between SMT and output. As backup, our SMT US Open reader was also being used simultaneously on our Bannister Lake Cloud server in case anything were to happen. If the primary server were to go down, it was an easy swap of IP addresses to get our score bugs and data up and running.
Since we were all enclosed on our own network, the production staff was using an open WiFi connection. We needed an easy way for them to enter daily and hourly messages on our venue tickers. Bannister Lake’s Community data service provided the solution. We created an account for the US Open producers and had them enter stories on our cloud instance. Using our Bannister Lake’s Community reader, we pulled those news items every minute and automatically had them appear on the tickers, without any operator intervention.
In addition to news, match stats, games in-progress, schedule, completed and weather info, we also showcased the grounds’ practice schedule, which automatically appears every morning as fans entered the venue. Fans could also interact with social media using Tagboard’s Social Media engine which was powering the moderation of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram photos, all funneled through Chameleon.
The US Open was an absolute beast of a project, and we learned a lot from the experience. We’re extremely confident with the solutions we devised and discovered that we could apply these same techniques on multiple types of high-profile, complex, data-centric events and production scenarios. A big thank you to VWSE Productions for accommodating Bannister Lake during this production as well as to The Academy of Lower Thirds for entrusting us with this assignment.
