Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 31) In-house digital production brings USC’s football and other sports programs to the Web. letic department officials recently decided to spin off a digital production operation dedicated to broadband video, with Rodriguez overseeing it. “The next evolution of all of this is a YouTube-esque, fully integrated video site that covers all of our sports, football being the primary one right now,” notes USC associate athletic director Jose Eskenazi, who oversees all of the athletic department’s licensing and sponsorship deals. “Looking across the board, programs like Notre Dame and Texas are doing similar stuff, but the breadth and depth of what we provide [on CSTV right now] is far above what other schools provide at this point. We’re making a pretty big investment in it.” That investment includes a recent expenditure of about $750,000 for new digital production tools, including three Sony HVR-Z1U hi-def cameras and three Sony HVR-DR60 hard-disk recorders. Four editing bays each run Final Cut Pro Studio 2 on 3.0GHz Mac Pro desktop computers, with each connected to a LAN-based Xserve RAID server. Meanwhile, about $300,000 of the expenditure is earmarked towards the upcoming construction of a dedicated production infrastructure at Dedeaux Field, where Trojan baseball games will ultimately be streamed live over CSTV using four remote-control Sony digital cameras. To run this new equipment, Rodriguez has been given a small production staff consisting of students, most of which don’t even major in a USC film school that’s second to none. “You’d think that we’d just have film students, but we have one guy who’s a music major and another guy who’s a film major,” he explains. “We’re kind of this underground department — we’re still pretty small, and we don’t advertise our jobs. We mainly get guys who are referred by other guys on staff.” The group is kept busy year-round. In football season, there are practice reports, player profiles and press conferences with the head coach to shoot, as well as copious pre- and post-game coverage to perform. (On its CSTV channel, USC wraps all of this original content around the rebroadcast of the most recent Trojan football game, which is shot by ESPN, Fox or whoever else has the TV rights, and repackaged for broadband streaming immediately after the game ends.) “We try to make everything three to five minutes long and make a lot of it,” Rodriguez says of his team’s football-related www.dv.com content, some of which winds up on the air of big-time TV broadcasters who are looking for ways to supplement their own game coverage. “We’re constantly getting bombarded with requests from whatever network [is showing the game],” Rodriguez adds. In addition to football — and Coach Tim Floyd’s men’s basketball team, which is also a big CSTV traffic generator — USC’s digital production group delivers live game coverage for a number of smaller-budgeted sports with more niche-oriented followings. “College soccer and volleyball wouldn’t ordinarily lend themselves to TV exposure, but they’re perfect for the Internet because there’s an audience willing to pay for that content,” notes Tom Buffolano, VP and GM for CSTV, which has established revenuesharing arrangements with its 215 university partners to split advertising and subscription monies. (USC charges subscribers $9.95 a month for an “all-access” pass to all the video on its channel, for example.) “Several years ago, when CSTV’s online business was in its infancy, most of the content we got was audio that was fed directly from local radio stations,” Buffolano adds. “The evolution of content production on campus has quickly gone to dedicated videographers shooting practices and press conferences, and schools realizing that this is the type of content fans will subscribe for. The schools are quickly becoming much more sophisticated in terms of how they program for these fans.” With so much to shoot — and the bar for production quality rising —Rodriguez spends much of his time in teaching mode with a staff of non-pros. “I don’t hesitate to say, ‘No, this doesn’t look good,’ he says. “My guys watch a lot of ESPN, but often times they have to be shown how to notice such things as the framing and the sound — how things are constructed aesthetically.” It is here where Rodriguez finds Pete Carroll’s competition principles useful — those who shoot the best footage get the best assignments on his staff, regardless of how long they’ve been around. “It’s not like if you’re a freshman, you end up just logging tape,” he notes. For that matter, no one on Rodriguez’s team is logging a lot of tape these days. “We’re shooting straight to hard drive now because it helps our workflow,” Rodriguez says. “If we’re covering a press conference, for example, hard drives make all the difference. This way, we can plug right into editing, then upload via FTP [to CSTV’s servers] when we’re done.” DV dv january 2008 31 http://www.dv.com
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