The NBA Replay Center in Secaucus, N.J., has 94 HD screens and an underlying fiber-optic network to provide refs across the land with faster instant replays. National Basketball Association
The Plaza at Harmon Meadow in Secaucus, N.J., is in the running for the most American place in the world. As you cruise through the parking lot of this office park/strip mall hybrid, 3.5 million square feet of U.S.A. unfurls before you. There’s a Houlihan’s, a Red Lobster, an Outback Steakhouse. A Chipotle, a Chili’s, a Cheeseburger In Paradise. A 14-screen movie theater, an L.A. Fitness. A Dunkin Donuts, which is literally inside a Subway.
But that’s just the appetizer. You can breeze past all that and arrive at the crown jewel of modern Americana. On the southeast end of the plaza is a diamond-shaped office building, and on the first floor, accessible via a hallway lined with an outstanding collection of basketball posters from the ‘70s and ‘80s, is televised-sports Xanadu. Through twin glass doors, 94 high-definition screens greet you with every single camera angle from every live NBA game—including camera angles you won’t see on TV.
This is the brand-new NBA Replay Center, mission control for the NBA’s ambitiously revamped video-review system. After more than two years and $15 million in development, it’ll make its operational debut when the 2014-2015 NBA season tips off tonight. And while the ultimate basketball den is a keg and a bucket of hot wings away from being the world’s greatest sports bar, the league has bigger plans for it: Helping officials make tough calls without disrupting the momentum of a game.
Inside the Beast
The Replay Center is a nationwide video interchange for the NBA, piping live footage in from every broadcast camera in each of the NBA’s 29 arenas. The system absorbs 12 broadcast-quality feeds from each game, with additional camera angles available from each broadcaster if they need it.
National Basketball Association
Within seconds, that raw video can be edited into crucial clips and beamed back to any arena for courtside review. While final decisions are still made by the referees on the court, every replay review will run through Secaucus. Dozens of operators in Secaucus will quickly cue up and edit clips to help officials make tricky calls. In many cases, a multi-angle, time-synced video mosaic will be ready for the refs before they get to the courtside monitors.
Video replay has been part of the NBA since the 2002 season, but reviewable calls were initially reserved to check buzzer-beaters and last-second fouls. Now, with 15 types of calls eligible for replay in the upcoming season, it has become an integral part of the game for referees. But despite the expansion of video-reviewable calls, courtside replays have still leaned heavily on favors from broadcast trucks, even as recently as last season.
“The broadcasters have what they call EVS channels and the referees would come to courtside, put on the headset, and talk to the broadcast trucks to feed them angles,” explains Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of operations and technology for the NBA. “Most of our reviews happened during timeouts, so it worked well. But as we added [in-game] replay triggers, it became a bit too much work for the trucks. That’s when the NBA decided we needed to take this over centrally.”
Hellmuth oversaw the implementation of the new system, which still uses video feeds from broadcasters. However, those feeds now pipe directly into the NBA’s new system without the need for play-by-play requests. From the broadcast trucks to the NBA’s own network to the Replay Center in Secaucus, the massive flow of 240-Mbps J2K-encoded HD video is shuttled back and forth across the continent by a 10-gigabit fiber-optic network operated by Zayo Group. It’s a redundant network that’s built to keep the feeds flowing even if there are outages, and it can run solely on batteries and a seven-day generator. On a full-slate gameday, that high-speed infrastructure will be called upon to deliver nearly 30TB of video between the NBA arenas and Secaucus.
On-the-Fly Editing
While the underlying network is impressive in terms of its speed, complexity, and sheer might, the last inch of the system—the interface used by replay operators to select, enlarge, edit, and share multi-angle clips—is equally impressive for its simplicity. The replay production features run on the Evertz DreamCatcher system used by several sports stadiums, broadcasters, and professional leagues.
To make the system a perfect fit for the NBA’s needs, Hellmuth and NBA Vice President of Referee Operations Joe Borgia used 15 regular-season games and last year’s NBA Finals as an elaborate dress rehearsal. During those games, replay clips were requested from broadcasters the old-fashioned way when the referees reviewed plays. But in the background, the league was honing the software they’d use for the first time this season.
“We tested timing, what were the best angles to use, what was the right communication protocol, what feeds could we get,” says Hellmuth of the 15-game regular season test. “Each of those Finals games became a software-design session for our referee operations group.”
Each NBA Replay Center workstation is a three-monitor setup, where operators can quickly edit, enhance, and share clips using touchscreens and a jog wheel. National Basketball Association
The result is that anyone who’s used a touchscreen can make a sophisticated multi-angle clip and beam it 2,400 miles away within seconds. Each of the Replay Center’s 14 workstations has a three-monitor setup and a jog-wheel console for scrubbing quickly through video. From jumping between live and archived action to flagging plays for review to sharing a live stream from a Secaucus monitor to a courtside display in Portland, much of the mission-critical work is done with quick taps on touchscreen monitors.
A left monitor in the setup shows a tile view of all available camera angles from the game; tapping them selects one or more feeds to work with. This brings up a full-screen view of the selection on the middle monitor, and the operator uses its multitouch screen to crop and enlarge a section of video. They can also instantly create a two-, three-, or four-box video mosaic automatically synced up in time code. The right monitor shows what will be displayed to referees on the courtside scoring table, and tapping an onscreen button instantly streams that footage to the arena.
“What really distinguished [the software] for us is that in the application, it allowed us to zoom, to do split-screens, to precisely synchronize the feeds, which is really important,” explains Hellmuth. “You have to know that the timing is exact on each side of that screen.”
Quickly creating these sophisticated clips will reduce the amount of time needed to review a play and keep a fast-flowing game moving, but the review process will still require stopping play for a few seconds. And despite the speed and efficiency of the new system, there will still be some replay situations it won’t be able to help with.
NBA Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology Steve Hellmuth. National Basketball Association
“I’d really like to come up with a methodology for recognizing pressure on the three-point line,” says Hellmuth. “No matter how good the cameras are, even if they’re 4K or 8K, their effectiveness is totally dependent on the angle from which [the cameras are] shooting.” To that end, Hellmuth says he has discussed a pressure-sensitive in-court system with Dr. Paul Hawkins, inventor of the Hawk-Eye system used in professional tennis and the English Premier League.
Hellmuth has a history of bringing technological innovation to the NBA. During the 2002-2003 season, he implemented rows of LED backboard lights to help referees see the release of the ball and an expiring clock at the same time. He also oversaw the implementation of the action-tracking STATS LLC SportVU system in all NBA arenas, and his next goal is to wed that system with the NBA’s new high-speed network to help referees make more tough calls.
“We have a player-tracking system but the information is not immediately available to us,” says Hellmuth. “What I’d really like to provide is information on ball trajectory. A goaltending call is a very difficult call to make, because you have to precisely describe the arc of the ball. So that’s tops on my list for next season.”
As for the offseason, don’t get your hopes up about the hot wings. “We’re going to produce some games remotely with the WNBA,” Hellmuth of the multi-million-dollar TV room in the offseason. “Bring back six camera feeds and switch the show back here—experiment with virtualized production, as it were.”
No comments:
Post a Comment