Bannister Lake Successfully Concludes the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2018 World Final in Monaco

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.

EA’s eFIFA FUT Amsterdam

 

The final leg of the eFifa FUT Global Series playoffs took place in Amsterdam over 6 days at the end of May.  128 players from around the world competed against each other for a chance to not only win this tournament, but to qualify for the FUT Grand Finals taking place in London in early August. 

Once again, Bannister Lake was called upon to provide moderated data for in show broadcast, and the venue’s digital signage. 

Since the tournament took place over 6 days, the requirements weren’t as complex as Manchesters’ tournament.  In Manchester, both Xbox and PS4 games were played at the same time, whereas in Amsterdam, only one console was played at a time.   This of course, didn’t diminish the quality of the production, but allowed us to focus more on the individual players and games. 

The biggest achievement in my opinion comes from this; A typical hockey, or baseball, or basketball or even soccer/football game, has your typical production crew.  A mobile truck, with a couple dozen camera feeds, 3-4 EVS operators, Technical Director, CG operator, Audio A1 and a couple A2s, a Stats producer, Associate Director, Director and Show Producer.  But for those broadcasts, it’s still a single game, taking place over 2-3 hours.   An eSports tournament is hundreds of games with hundreds of players over 8-10 hours, but the broadcast demands and requires the same quality output as your single game/2-team format.    

Some stats to ponder:

  • over 60 Xpression graphics templates built, linked to data provided by Chameleon
  • 472 games played during this Amsterdam tournament, with 10 different stats per game
  • 128 players, with 8 different individual stats per player
  • archived stats from Barcelona and Manchester totaling 944 games with 256 players
  • 2 Xpression operators, with 4 channels of output.
  • 2 automated Chameleon L-Bars (one with and without sponsors)
  • 2 automated digital signage feeds for in-house signage (Xbox and PS4 content)
  • exclusive news feeds content, entered by the talent and EA’s social media team 

With eSports broadcasts being produced more and more, with viewership increasing over the million mark, production demands will require things to be extremely efficient.   Chameleon is just one of those tools that help make something like this possible.  

Integrating the Chameleon into our Productions has super-charged the amount of info we’re able to communicate to our audiences.  For the past 2 seasons we’ve relied on the Chameleon architecture to power our onscreen info-graphics.  The system itself is very straightforward to integrate; Producers and Talent are able to update it in the heat of the action and most importantly –  using Chameleon has resulted in better storytelling, and more flexibility in how we tell those stories.

 

TJ Walker

Boombox Group

Head of Production

Bannister Lake wishes to thank Boombox Group for choosing Chameleon as their tool of choice for displaying and moderating the tournaments’ data. 

 

 

EA’s FIFA eSports Manchester

 

The 2nd leg of the eSports FIFA eWorld Cup Tournament took place in Manchester Apr 13-15 2018.  Once again Bannister Lake was hired by Boombox to assist with aggregating and moderating stats for the tournament using it’s powerful Chameleon platform.  This time around however, Chameleon was truly tested to its full potential. Like the previous tournament, Chameleon was used as the central platform to aggregate data from game ops who entered in tournament scores and stats.  This includes individual player stats (games played, wins, losses, goals for and against, GFA/GAA and win order) and individual game stats (Games 1/2/ET/PK results, goals/shots for player 1&2).  And like the previous tournament, these stats were feeding 2 Ross XPression character generators to populate player and head to head boards throughout the tournament. This was done by using Chameleon’s restfulAPI Blade and Chameleon’s query module working with XPression’s datalinq tool using datalink keys.  This method allowed for the operators to enter a player’s name in a search box, which in turn called up all the players stats.

While Chameleon was responsible for populating templates in XPression, Chameleon’s own rendering engine was used during the tournament as well, in a form of an L-Bar.   In February, this L-Bar was used exclusively to showcase stats, social media and news items to the viewers, but this time, we’ve added a feature to display sponsors.

Because of Chameleon’s ability to provide AsRuns, we integrated the sponsors to be displayed on the L-Bar itself and scheduled the sponsors to appear on-air at a specific time during the day using Assets Schedule.  If the L-Bar wasn’t on-air during that particular time, we used Chameleon’s Switcher app to trigger the sponsor manually as well. At the end of the tournament, we handed off a PDF of the played sponsors and their duration on screen, providing another element for the production.

In February, the production and social media staff also used Chameleon to enter news stories and filter social media entries.  Like in February, the news entries being entered were used as an exclusive gateway to viewers watching, as oppose to simply relying on social media.  Only viewers of the show were exposed to in-depth analysis and on the floor reporting. The influencers and casters were responsible for entering anything they heard on the floor (using an iPad) and the social media team were responsible for approving those stories before going to air.

Some new moderation features were added to Chameleon to assist with production to easily search and filter through stats.   One in particular was Query Results which was used on air with talent to call up specific results. The host quizzed some of the casters with questions based on Chameleon’s queries, including top 10 goals-for players in the tournament, top 10 goals-against, and top goals-differentials, to name a few.  

This wasn’t enough however, as Ncompass, one of two clients during this tournament, requested another feature be provided throughout the tournament in a form of digital signage.  Especially used during day 1 of the tournament when 128 players were competing on PS4 and XBOX consoles, the players needed an easy way to see where they were in the standings and who their next match-ups would be.  Using Chameleon’s channels, we provided two individual urls feeds (PS4 & XBOX) which were in turn used on about 16 monitors placed around the venue. Intel PC sticks were connected VIA HDMI with WiFi, and directed to open the urls in Chrome full screen.  

 

A bonus added feature for digital signage was a countdown clock, informing players of the next round in the tournament, and the ability to trigger announcement and messages using Chameleon’s assets module.   The messages were treated as snipes, able to trigger on/off manually or automatically based on their requirements.

To recap, our single instance of Chameleon, aggregated and moderated 128 players with their stats, with 473 games played, filtering and creating queries for the casters to monitor,  populated 2 XPression systems with dozens of templates, 2 Chameleon L-Bar tickers (one with and one without sponsorship enabled) and 2 separate feeds for digital signage populating over 16 screens at the venue.  All for less than $2,000.

There is a final leg to this tournament coming up at the end of May/June.  

 

Query about EA’s FIFA eTournament

Al Savoie is the Creative and Tech Director at Bannister Lake who recently worked with EA Sports to come up with way for gamer data to play out and hit the masses. The event is a marathon, taking place over 3 days with 128 players, on both Xbox and PS4 consoles.  Friday was a Swiss tournament round, with Saturday and Sunday being the Bracket Elimination Rounds. Here are some industry insights from his week in Barcelona.

 

Can you describe the client and what they needed to happen for this tournament?

Sure, but let me give you a little background first.

With eSports tournaments becoming more popular as an event, watched by millions around the globe, eSports productions want to try to match conventional broadcast quality programming.

They want to match broadcast production, similar to what you see in NBA or NFL live events. But unlike those conventional offerings that focus on one game, eSports had 511 games over the course of the tournament increasing production demand.  And keep in mind that each game is roughly twenty minutes in length so a lot of turnaround.

Camera, audio, lighting are pretty standard, but BOOMBOX Group needed a way to filter and moderate all those player stats and then display it in some way graphically.  They needed a tool to allow them to easily do this. In the past they were limited in how to display player stats with such a quick turnaround – it wasn’t easy to moderate.

For example on the Friday, the first day Swiss Bracket Round,  there was no way to display  gamer wins or losses, goals for or against for the 128 players over the 7 Rounds.  Since broadcast couldn’t focus on all the games at the same time, they needed a way to display that information for the viewers.  The Chameleon provided a solution to automatically populate player stats without a need for inputting manually.

 

The key idea behind BOOMBOX using Chameleon in this production was to assist in filtering and moderating data, to be used primarily in XPression on the Saturday and Sunday broadcasts, but also as a ticker using Chameleon’s own rendering engine.

Chameleon’s Query module was required here.  We needed to create APIs for XPression to easily search players based on a round and who they were playing against.  Data was to be entered manually on location by the tournament ops crew, and sent over to the Chameleon database using a custom reader written by Georg at BL.  Once in Chameleon,  we wrote our own queries to filter what we needed for XPression.

With XPression settled, they also wanted to add another layer, in the form of the Chameleon web player, as the primary graphics system on the Friday during the very complicated Swiss format elimination round.

 

How many staff were involved? How does it compare to other large scale live events that Bannister has been involved in?

Well, typically Bannister Lake participates in elections in terms of live events. Our solutions are usually for tickers and branding that exist on a network, 24-7.

What makes this interesting is that an election is very similar to a lot of eSport events, in this case the candidates are the gamers, all competing and vying for a spot in the finals. It requires up to the minute stats/results. Usually elections require a lot of manpower but Chameleon doesn’t. It was a two-man job from the outset for us. Our software is designed to be very efficient; not a lot of staff required.

As for production staff, it took the same amount of people to produce NHL game, for example. For broadcast professionals, they may feel like this type of production feels cheaper only because the play out is non traditional (Youtube/Twitch),  but one could argue that the amount of money is equal, if not more, than a produced NHL game. Most staff were working 12 for 14 hour days and there is a ton of work and back end effort being put into these games! On the day, using Chameleon, there were 6 production and social media staffers populating content. For a Canadian election, like the Canadian Global Television broadcast, it’s usually about twelve production staffers who will use the product.

 

So there were a lot of firsts for this EA eWorld Championship?

Yes. First time our Chameleon renderer was used in a live event.  For the event, it was the first time being able to aggregate such a vast amount of data. That data was used on our web output that circulated player stats throughout the tournament. They used tickers in the past but nothing like this. In fact, hosts were entering info themselves!  That’s the Millennial generation; instead of using Twitter, the talent used our system and created a sort of exclusive news aura, or a community, around the event.

 

What were some of the key benefits you told BOOMBOX about using Chameleon web as part of the production?

First, Chameleon UI being a browser based platform, made it easy for anyone to jump on and input/moderate data.  Second, our Chameleon renderer outputted data where they keyed the live video overlay on top.  Rather than spend thousands on a broadcast CG system, instead, they used a Chrome browser and a laptop.

Chameleon was a huge hit. The L-Bar Chameleon web ran throughout the whole weekend, displaying news, tweets, player cards and scores. Their social media team literally had a 15 minute tutorial on how to use Twitter in Chameleon, and they got it. The hosts were responsible for entering news using their iPads on the floor, with a moderation level by the EA executives.   They too only had a 15 min tutorial but got it quickly.  
EA,  Boombox and NCompass were extremely pleased with what we offered. It really helped elevate their production to another level.  One in which they now can’t go down from.   
 

What were some of the challenges trying to manage such a large team roster? There were a total of 128 players, correct? That’s almost as large as a world championship sporting event.

Well, it is a world sport championship event. Sure it’s still one venue with everyone in that one venue but we are still talking about over 500 individual games being played. On the Chameleon end we had to make sure the leagues were separated between XBox and PS4 consoles. After that we needed to log all 128 players with their qualifying stats and upcoming tournament stats. Since we aren’t using player names, we were using “gamer tags” who love to change their tags, often up to the night before…that’s about 25% that needed to match these new names with their qualifying stats and headshots.

 

What’s the future of data in eSport events?

We have two tournaments coming up and we want to continue to improve Chameleon and improve what we can offer our clients,  viewers and the gamers.  

Al Savoie is a graphics systems whiz who can answer and further questions

Email him at asavoie@bannisterlake.com

 



 

New Included Data Feeds with Bannister Lake’s Chameleon

Included data

CAMBRIDGE 09-13-2017 – Bannister Lake announces data feeds are now included with the powerful Chameleon platform, the software company’s latest broadcast and media Cloud, NDI and SDI compatible graphics and ticker solution.  

Data includes weather, financial, sports scores and US National Weather Alerts at no additional cost for Chameleon customers.  This is in addition to the already available content modules such as alerts, events, closings, Twitter/Facebook, elections and NEWS.

“Free data, what’s not to love?” states Georg Hentsch, “That’s the inherent value to any  company who relies on vasts amounts of published information.   Currently we have North American sports  (NHL, NBA, NFL, MLB) and finance data includes currencies, indices, commodities and Dow Jones.  More leagues and finance options are available on demand.  As for weather cities, we currently have all the world capitals, along with major cities in the US and Canada. Again, more can be added as requested. “

In addition to the included data provided, Chameleon has many data source plugins at no additional cost. Plugin sources include Calendar (ical), Google Sheets, Inrix, Barchart, Stats, WSI, and Weather Underground no name a few.  Custom readers can be created at a minimal cost or can be built by 3rd parties/customers using Chameleon’s open data model.

At IBC meet the team at Ontario booth in hall 2A .

About Chameleon and Bannister Lake

The all-In-one solution for branding and news content delivery is an adaptable media graphics solution for NDI, SDI and Digital online applications, containing the company’s best branding and ticker elements that media organizations expect in an increasingly on-demand broadcast environment.  Recently used at NDI Central NewTek booth and Broadcast Beat’s production at the NAB show, the versatile software system, blends seamlessly with other tech solutions.  Bannister Lake has partnered with leaders in the broadcast industry such as Imagine Communications, Grass Valley, Broadstream, AJA Video and Ross Video

The New Data Types Are Coming!

Included data

Our customers have always pushed us to provide containers that can store their unique data requirements. Take a sports score. At one point, it was enough to show the teams, score and status. But over time, customers wanted to show ball possession, the count, shots on goal, team rankings, standings and records.

We solved “Creeping Featuritis” simply and expansively: dynamic fields. And added dynamic fields to all data types.

This made it possible to contain anything using one of the existing data types. However, what also happened is we ended up hacking stories because that became the most common container for storing those “custom” data types.

So, what better way to solve a custom data type than to create a custom data type. Look for a new icon in that Content Control in the near future called Custom. It’ll be similar to stories without the story. It’ll have a way of organizing using topics and playlists as in stories but custom gives dynamic fields preferential treatment. No longer do you have to open a dialog to see them. They are given primetime.

Custom is a great way to store anything you can dream up. It’ll get all the other great data treatment like rundown, BLADE and Query support.

Query you say? What is that? Have you ever wanted to create a playlist of all close election races where incumbents are losing, scores of games in progress, stocks that are tanking or stories that include a certain keyword? That’s what we call dynamic playlists and they were essentially impossible to do until now.

We’ve added a new Query data type which is essentially a database query. If you can dream it, it can be described in SQL. And these queries also get the full data treatment: rundowns & BLADE. Here are some examples:

The reason Query is dynamic is because the actual SQL gets executed at runtime. So, when in a rundown for a player, the player executes the Query as late as possible. Same for BLADE: the query gets executes on the api call.

What’s more, Query can be shared among all Super Ticker users. If you have a Query you think is useful to others, you can publish it. Once published, users can see and deploy the query. As you’d expect, once deployed, the query can be fiddled as required. The main reason for publish/deploy of Queries is we can’t expect all users to be SQL experts. But that being said, we do provide a Query Wizard to make life easier for those less than hardcore users.

With Custom’s and Query’s inauguration, we say farewell to Ski Reports. We’re phasing that oddball out. If you want Ski Reports, use Custom!

Also, look for big enhancements to some of our other data types like Closings, Events, Media and Weather but I’ll save that for a future blog.