DAYTONA, Fla.—The Fox Sports production of this year’s Daytona 500 will see the addition of a few new tech elements and the continued unfolding of the broadcaster’s quest to realize additional workflow efficiencies while enhancing quality.

(The Daytona 500 begins Sunday, Feb. 16, at 2:30 p.m. EST. It will be broadcast live on Fox and the Fox Sports app. Live streamers can watch via YouTube TV, Sling TV, Hulu + Live TV and Fubo.)

As it did during the Super Bowl on Feb. 9, Fox Sports will introduce Cosm super-wide-angle cameras into its race coverage, working with the entertainment dome experience specialist on where best to place them around the 2.5-mile track. The broadcaster, which also plans to add a heavy-lift drone with a full-size camera and lens, will rely on new optically generated tracking data from NASCAR to drive its SportsMEDIA Technology (SMT) graphics, Michael Davies, executive vice president of technical and field operations at Fox Sports, said.

This Sunday’s race, the first time Fox Sports will cover the Daytona 500 under a new seven-year contract with NASCAR, “doesn’t change that much in what we put on air,” Davies said. It does mark the beginning of a new chapter that will see Fox Sports, NBC Sports, Amazon Prime Video and TNT Sports carry all 38 NASCAR Cup Series races through 2031. (The Feb. 2 Busch Light Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is regarded as a preseason race.)

The deal divides distribution among the entities. “On any given weekend, you’re going to have Fox on [NASCAR] Cup; Amazon on practice and qualifying; The CW Network on the Xfinity race; and [TNT Sports] doing the in-cars,” Davies said. (Fox Sports and NBC Sports will each carry 14 NASCAR Cup Series races. Prime Video and TNT will split the 10 remaining midseason races.)

Fox Sports, which will produce its coverage in 1080p high dynamic range (HDR), in some instances will produce the shows for other networks and in others will hand off various feeds. “In a raw technological sense, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference when you are sitting in the truck and actually producing the show,” Davies said. “It’s really just the downstream proliferation of everything that’s going to be different.”

The Spectacle
The Daytona 500 is considered a spectacle because it’s the biggest race in NASCAR with fans and dignitaries, such as former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, often in attendance. “If you look online, President [Donald] Trump may or may not be at this one as well,” Davies said.

Regardless, Fox Sports will treat the production like a spectacle, erecting a stage just as it does for the Indianapolis 500 and Super Bowl. “Daytona commands a real pregame presence that we don’t do for other races,” he said. “You’ve got the grand marshal, the national anthem and the flyover. It’s a big buildup, not unlike the Super Bowl. We won’t do six and a half hours of pregame programming like the Super Bowl, but we’re doing quite a bit with our own stage and crew focused on pregame.”

Newly added Cosm cameras will help the broadcaster capture that spectacle for viewers. Unlike at the Super Bowl, the super-wide angle of the cameras’ shots may not simply be used after being de-warped and selecting a 16-by-9 area of interest for TV viewers, Davies said.

“Maybe some of these cameras look good as they are. I think this is just one of those wait-and-see items. We might be able to use them in a couple of ways,” Davies said during an interview conducted midweek before the race.

One of the ways he is considering taking advantage of the cameras’ wide viewpoint is to capture as many as six or seven pits in the same shot. While the broadcaster normally uses a traditional broadcast camera with a wide-angle lens to capture pit stops, the extra-wide angle of the Cosm camera’s viewpoint will enable the broadcaster to capture more, he said.

“One of the things I like about working with those guys is it’s never a totally separate production [one for Fox and one for presentation at a Cosm Dome in Dallas and Los Angeles],” Davies said. “There’s always the middle of a Venn diagram—the crossover—where both of us can enjoy what we’re putting out.”

The heavy-lift drone, another new addition, will complement the FPV and other drones deployed to cover the race. “We’ve done it before on some races, but we’re going to employ the heavy-lift drone with a big-boy camera and real lens at Daytona to get additional coverage that adds into the fact that this is a bigger race,” he said.

One significant technical change viewers will not notice on-air is NASCAR’s use of a new system based largely on optical technology rather than GPS to gather accurate tracking data for Fox Broadcast graphics. “We’re still going to use the SMT to render those graphics, but under the hood is something completely different,” he said.

Production Efficiencies
For this year’s “Great American Race,” Fox Sports has rolled eight trucks to the Daytona International Speedway, fewer than in the past and a continuation of a downward trend, Davies said.

“Ten years ago, there were 10 additional trucks in the compound to do, roughly speaking, what is happening now,” Davies said, adding that ESPN was also involved at the time.

“It was a massive compound,” he said.” You had the shared resources and RF trucks right in the middle. Then on one side you had ESPN land and on the other side Fox land,” pointing out that those shows were produced in 720p, not 1080p as will be done this year.

The point, however, isn’t simply to reduce the expense of on-site production trailers, but also to streamline workflows and save on the expense of certain personnel, who can work remotely on race coverage.

“I’ll give you several instances [of remote personnel working on the production],” he said. “We have replay people working both in Pittsburgh and in California. We have some graphics people in Pittsburgh. We also have racing radio editors and producers who work from their homes. And we have our race editor working from home as well.”

An edit room equals about one-quarter of a production trailer. The space needed to edit racing radio takes up another quarter. These and other reductions begin to add up and enable the broadcaster to remove entire trailers or downsize to a smaller vehicle, as Fox Sports is doing this year by replacing a trailer dedicated to graphics with its remote personnel and those working in the van devoted to SportsMEDIA Technology graphics, Davies said.

Among the biggest reasons Fox Sports has been able to reduce how many OB vehicles it sends to produce races is the availability of fiber-optic connectivity at NASCAR tracks, eliminating latency concerns, he said.

“[For a time], not all [the tracks] were fiber,” he said. “But we spent some money and got them all fiber. Obviously, we’re now reaping the gains from that.”

DAYTONA, Fla.–Fox Sports, NASCAR and Racing Force Group have inked a deal to use the leading-edge Driver's Eye micro-camera POV technology for the NASCAR Cup Series events aired by Fox Sports. The racing league began using the helmet camera tech during its biggest annual event, the Daytona 500 over the weekend. 

Racing Force Group says its Driver's Eye is the first and only FIA homologated micro camera in the world that can be integrated inside a racing helmet, and the world's most compact camera for live broadcasting: this gives the audience an exact view of what the drivers see in the car during the race. In its latest spec, the camera achieved an impressive size of 0.35x0.35 inches and a weight of 0.003 pounds, according to the company.

The NASCAR deal follows a similar announcement from Formula 1 last month to deploy the POV cameras for the upcoming 2023 Grand Prix season. 

Adopting the camera tech is part of NASCAR’s campaign to increase viewership, which had been on the decline in recent years. However in 2022, 3,696,000 viewers on average watched the NASCAR Cup Series events broadcast on Fox and FS1 channels, and across the entire 2022 season, viewership was up 4% and household share was up 10% year-over-year.

Fox Sports' portion of the 2023 season will end with the coverage of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 event at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday, June 11.

"This agreement is yet another landmark for the growth of the Driver's Eye technology in the car racing industry," said Alexandros Miotto Haristos, COO of Racing Force Group in Italy. "Few brands in motorsports are as popular as NASCAR, even outside the United States, and this three-axis partnership with NASCAR Cup Series and Fox is a further proof about our product's quality. We thank both NASCAR and Fox for trusting our system, which is already adopted by other top championships. 

"Moreover, Racing Force Group can strengthen its prestige across the American market, where it is already playing a leading role through all its brands, plus an expansion project in place."

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—Fox Sports will deploy XtraMotion, its super slow-motion interpolation technology co-developed with EVS, on prem for the first time during a NASCAR race Sunday, Feb. 19 for its coverage of the Daytona 500.

(Coverage of the Daytona 500, aka "The Great American Race," begins on Fox and Fox Deportes at 2:30 p.m. EST. Coverage is also available on the Fox Sports app, Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV and fuboTV.)

First deployed for the race in 2021, XtraMotion processing at that time was done offsite in the AWS Cloud where a theoretically limitless number of CPUs and GPUs created new video between frames shot at normal speed to synthesize slow motion. XtraMotion, in essence, turned every camera into a super slow-motion camera.

The downside, however, was depending on the cloud to interpolate the frames remotely. The distance introduced latency that required the broadcaster to be judicious about how it integrated XtraMotion footage into its coverage. 

Stoppages in the race due to crashes, for example, gave Fox Sports the time needed—as much as five minutes—to generate the synthesized super slow-motion footage and have it ready to insert into the production. Having XtraMotion processing available in a rack-mounted device on-site changes that.

“What's cool about having XtraMotion processing on site is that, when something happens, you send video to the XtraMotion processor, and then it turns back up in your EVS playlist as a 3x super motion clip, and it does that in five seconds,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations, at Fox Sports.

Generating XtraMotion on prem also enables the system to treat incoming source video as a “growing clip,” which means there’s effectively no limit to the length of the super slow-motion interpolated segment.  

“It’s going to be amazing for in-car [cameras] because obviously we can’t do in-cars as super motion,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how often it gets used because of how quick the turnaround is.”

Helmet Cams
The Great American Race will also see the first use of video cameras integrated directly into the helmets of drivers to give viewers a driver’s eye view of the race rather than relying on vizor helmet cameras that were temporarily attached to the head protection, he says.

“Racing Force is the company behind Bell Helmets, and they have the knowledge to execute the integration of the cameras,” says Davies.

Fox Sports, which will shoot the Daytona 500 in 1080p HDR, will rely on an extensive complement of cameras (see Camera Map), including several drone cameras from Beverly Hills Aerials. 

“Beverly Hills Aerials, which we have worked with in the past, brings several different types of airships, each used for a different purpose,” says Davies.

Those include the small, lightweight Hummingbird drone that can fly around people with their permission, the FPV high-speed drone used in NASCAR straightaways due to its speed and a heavy-lift drone.

“The heavy-lift drone is a big, multiple rotor aircraft with a stabilized camera—a real 60- to 70-pound camera,” says Davies. 

Davies draws a distinction between how drones are used in race coverage when compared to other sports. “The interesting thing about racing is that unlike stick-and-ball sports where drones are basically used to generate glorified feature beauty shots, auto racing can actually use drones to as actual coverage cameras,” he says. 

The difference is the size and setup of the raceway, which makes it possible to fly the drones along large, unpopulated corridors to capture race footage without flying over people, says Davies, who adds that every year the industry is achieving more trust among regulators at the FAA by demonstrating drones can be used safely even when thousands of people are nearby in the stands.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Radios in NASCAR that let fans hear the drivers are nothing new, but efforts continue every year to improve the quality of this audio to enhance the experience of viewers, says Davies.

Doing so is a mix of technology and how personnel are allocated. On the technology side, audio compression helps make the conversations on the two-way radios clearer. When it comes to personnel, Fox Sports dedicates one person to a radio submixer whose only job is to “pepper in actual talk,” he says.

“Then we actually have a racing radios editor, who is actually in his home in Georgia. He listens to the radio and actually plays it back, depending on what the content is,” says Davies.

The Fox Sports senior vice president adds that work is underway on a project that sometime this race season aims to add captions to those conversations. “We’re working with Veritone on that project. It’s a difficult challenge. By the nature of radios not being that great of a source when it comes to quality, generating those captions is going to be a feat.”

Distributed Workflow
While there are 30 to 40 Fox Sports production personnel on site, NASCAR production has transitioned over the past few years to a distributed model workflow. The broadcaster will leverage production personnel in the Fox Sports Vault in Los Angeles, others in Pittsburgh and still others at its Charlotte, N.C., NASCAR studio. There is also a video editor as well as the racing radios editor and racing radios mixer who will be working from their homes, says Davies.

“This is the thing about NASCAR, every year for the last four years, I’ve lost an entire truck from our compound,” he says. “What you see today compared to 2018 is four fewer trucks, and we are doing exactly the same show, if not more.”

The main production vehicles on site are Game Creek’s Cleatus A and B units, which will be used by Fox Sports and NBC Sports throughout the NASCAR racing season. While an SDI-based truck, SMPTE ST 2110 is playing a big role on site for distribution although “the core is still good-old SDI,” he says.

What really drew attention to the decline in the number of trucks on site in Davies’ mind was a conversation he had with a younger crew member. “I was talking to one of the kids who hadn’t been here before, and I recounted the days when we had ESPN and DirecTV here—literally 20 trucks in the compound. But it’s not like that anymore.”

“At this point, I’ve kind of hit rock bottom,” Davies adds with a chuckle. “I wasn’t able to lose another truck this year.”

More information on XtraMotion is available on the EVS website.

More information on Bell Helmets is available online.

More information on video production drones is available on the Beverly Hills Aerials website.

More information on Veritone is available online.

PITTSBURGH—NEP Group has announced the release of a new mobile unit, SRT3, which was custom-built to support NASCAR’s Shared Resources.

SRT3 connects to both the NEP and NASCAR centralized production environments, NEP said. Its main functions include supporting all of NASCAR’s broadcast obligations, including the distribution of shared resource signals needed by various broadcast partners, the encoding of signals used for the remote production of world feeds, screen feeds, officiating, scoring and race control.

“Implementing NEP’s SRT3 for the 2022 NASCAR season has been a successful collaboration between our production teams and NEP’s talented team of broadcast engineers,” said Steve Stum, vice president, operations and technical production, NASCAR.  “We are excited about what this new mobile unit is adding to NASCAR’s Shared Resources and to our various broadcast partners, both for today and for what it will provide us in the future.”

This new mobile unit serves as the broad solution supporting NASCAR’s main production, and has the ability to easily transition to employ more IP gear so that it can support NASCAR’s current and future needs, NEP said. 

SRT3 is powered by NEP’s Platform Control (TFC), a proprietary software solution that comes pre-loaded in new NEP mobile units like SRT3. 

TFC is the control system used throughout NEP’s ecosystem, including traditional remote facilities as well as centralized production facilities. TFC allows for configuring, provisioning, orchestration and granular monitoring of broadcast, IT and network systems. Built by NEP’s software engineers to solve the industry issues around IP control and software defined networking (SDN), TFC is technology agnostic, making it compatible with virtually any technology in the broadcast and live event environment.

SRT3 debuted at NASCAR’s inaugural “Clash at the Coliseum” race at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Feb. 6, 2022. The LA Memorial Coliseum was transformed from a grass venue to a quarter-mile asphalt racetrack for this unique exhibition, and NEP’s SRT3 supported NASCAR in capturing the sights and sounds to tell the story of this historic event for the sport.

Following the success of its first show, SRT3 is now supporting NASCAR’s marquee event, this week’s 64th running of the Daytona 500, before deploying to each race on the 2022 circuit.

“The collaboration of NEP’s Systems Integration, Engineering and Remote Operations teams has evolved with much success. This project brings new innovations to the broadcast compound and everyone is proud of what’s been accomplished,” said Glen Levine, president, NEP U.S. Broadcast Services. “This continues NEP’s decades-long relationship with NASCAR. Like so many projects we’ve worked with NASCAR on over the years, this technical solution was born in partnership with their production and technical teams. They were in need of a broadcast solution and trusted NEP to deliver a mobile unit design that meets all of their needs.” 

DAYTONA, Fla.—NASCAR’S Next Gen car will make its official debut Sunday, Feb. 20, here with the motorsport’s Cup Series at the Daytona 500, but there’s more to this seventh generation of the sport’s stock car than its resemblance to the cars fans actually drive, especially when it comes to television production.

Alongside the changes that give the car faster acceleration and make it more nimble—as Kurt Busch noted after making a test run in November—this latest generation car incorporates updates for where in-car cameras are positioned and how telemetry and video and audio data are transmitted.

“NASCAR included us in the design, which I thought was pretty cool,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president, technical and field operations, at Fox Sports. “We went down to the [NASCAR] R&D Center in Concord, N.C., and we had a body for the new car. We played around with where we could put cameras with the actual guys who were testing the car.

“It was the first time we actually had our director and producer… [involved with where] we were able to position the cameras,” he added.

(Fox and Fox Deportes will air the Daytona 500 on Sunday, Feb. 20, starting at 2:30 p.m. ET. It also will be available on the Fox Sports app. The pre-race show begins at 11 a.m. ET on FS1 and moves to Fox at 1 p.m. ET.)

Two notable changes were made to camera positioning. First, the front bumper cam was positioned extremely low to the ground. “It doesn't sound like a front bumper cam is something that would actually make a difference. But you know, when you see it, it's pretty cool,” says Davies.

The second, which may or may not be ready for Sunday’s race, is a rear spoiler cam looking down the side of the car that required “a fair amount of collaboration with NASCAR,” he says. 

Video Game Previs
As with its coverage of the Busch Light Clash at the Los Angeles Coliseum two weeks ago, Fox Sports turned to video games for previsualization of the types of shots that were possible—but this time instead of being used to determine camera positions at the venue, they helped in deciding where the front bumper and rear spoiler cams should be located.

“Obviously, in video games there's some cameras that you can duplicate and some that you can't,” says Davies. “But, you know, the spoiler shot and the front bumper shot were directly informed by the way people play video games.”

NASCAR, however, didn’t fulfill all of the broadcaster’s wishes for new in-car camera positioning. Most notably, Fox had suggested a new camera location inside the car, but by time the car’s design was completed, “a bunch of stuff” newly added to the interior obstructed its view, he says.

But the visor cam that clips to drivers’ helmets will offer viewers a good look at something new—the Next Gen car’s redesigned dashboard and the new video rearview mirror, he says.

While the in-car cameras continue to be 720p HD, that’s not for a lack of trying to upgrade to 1080p HD. However, the supply chain issues that have rippled across the economy prevented them from being ready for Daytona. Over the season, as availability allows, the 1080p cameras will replace the older existing cameras, says Davies.

While Fox broadcasts in 720p, Fox Sports will produce the Daytona 500 in 1080p, which will be downconverted. “The only people who will see it in 1080p are the people in the production truck,” says Davies.

Supply chain disruptions also delayed Next Gen car updates to telemetry. “The car is kind of set up for the future in terms of being able to move signals around it more efficiently, trying to get the camera feeds and the data and the telemetry in one feed,” he says. 

As with the 1080p in-car camera upgrade, Fox had to postpone the change until later in the season when the technology required becomes more readily available, says Davies.

‘Bites Of The Apple’
Beyond the cars themselves, Fox Sports will enhance its use of drones and add an 80-foot camera crane.

“Daytona has a really exciting, front midway. We wanted to bring people out there, especially for a fairly long pre-race [show], which is what we have. We're going to use the crane for that shot,” says Davies.

By the time the race begins, the crane will be repositioned to the backstretch. There it will be used to “try to peek over that back car,” he says.

Fox also will add a new graphics look customized for the race. “The interesting thing about the way Fox is approaching the graphics package now is that instead of having one graphics package that kind of gets morphed into other sports, each graphics package is completely different for every sport,” says Davies.

One other tech change is the production truck that will be used in Daytona. Fox Sports will rely on Game Creek Encore to do the show instead of Game Creek Cleatus, the truck it normally uses for race coverage. That truck was on the West Coast to produce "The Clash" at the L.A. Coliseum a few weeks back and will be used as the race season progresses. “Encore is the same truck that does football and will do the Super Bowl next year,” he says.

Davies, who has been doing Daytona 500 for 16 years, notes this year’s race schedule is different than in the past—a change he sees with an upside. 

“It used to be that The Clash was the week before [the Daytona 500]. We had sort of a regimented schedule that really hadn't changed for years,” he says.

“This time we have the ARCA [Menards Series], the Duels and then Daytona. So now, there's literally five races between… [the start of the season] and Sunday, which is good because it gives us a lot of bites at the apple in terms of getting it right,” says Davies. 

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The Daytona 500 is the Super Bowl of auto racing, and like the actual Super Bowl, the race serves as a showcase for several new or improved production technologies that enhance viewer enjoyment—this year in the form of shots from multiple in-car cameras enhanced with interpolated super slow motion and a high-speed drone capable of bursting to speeds of 100 mph, says Michael Davies, senior vice president, field operations at Fox Sports.

“Daytona, as it is every year, is the biggest race of the year. It’s also the first race of the year, and this is no different in COVID times. You know, Daytona, even in COVID times, is the Super Bowl of racing—after the Super Bowl of Super Bowls,” says Davies with a chuckle.

(The Fox telecast of the Daytona 500 starts Sunday, Feb. 14, at 2:30 p.m. EST. Live streaming coverage will be available via Fox Sports Go. Clint Bowyer, a former Cup Series driver, NASCAR Hall of Famer Jeff Gordon and play-by-play announcer Mike Joy will call the race.)

Fox Sports is deploying nearly 100 cameras, including a GoPro suspended from a racing drone and a Sony P1 from a heavy-lift drone, mirrorless DSLR-like Megalodon cameras from Sony and Canon and multiple in-car cameras per car, to heighten its coverage of the 63rd running of the race.

DRONES AND MEGALODON

Using drones to cover the race is nothing new for Fox Sports, but this year the broadcaster is expanding its airborne coverage, says Davies.

Fox Sports is turning for the second year in a row to Beverly Hills Aerials to capture footage from aloft. Last year, the company provided a racing platform it calls an “FPV,” or first person view drone, to capture dynamic shots of the race. This year, the company has taken its FPV drone to a new level, achieving sustained speeds of 70-80 mph and short spurts of 100 mph, says Beverly Hills Aerials chief pilot Michael Izquierdo.

“The FPV drone is able to accelerate to super-fast speeds and even track with the cars on caution laps when they’re going a little bit slower than 200 mph,” he says.

Beverly Hills Aerials’ custom-built heavy-lift drone carries a camera package that includes the P1 camera, batteries and microwave transmitter from Broadcast Sports International (BSI) weighing in at 25 pounds, says Izquierdo.

The drones may operate in a 100-foot-wide fly zone just off the track and away from the fans. “This keeps a nice buffer between us and all of the people on one side and the cars on the other side,” he explains. The only exception is when the drones are allowed to fly over the track at the very end of the race.

“Once the winner crosses the finish line and usually comes back to do donuts, we’re allowed to go on the track and get really close to the cars and the celebration,” he adds.

Fox Sports made a splash covering NFL end zone celebrations with its Megalodon camera system, and now it’s taking the rig to Daytona Beach for race coverage.

“What it is, is a somewhat inexpensive prosumer rig that involves Sony or Canon mirrorless cameras that look just like DSLRs,” says Davies. “We put it on some kind of stabilized rig, like a Ronin handheld, so they are super agile.”

For NASCAR race coverage, Fox Sports is attaching the camera system to a Red Rock Micro DigiBoom—a “sort-of high-end professional selfie stick,” says Davies. This configuration along with a wireless system gives the broadcaster a stabilized jib that it plans to use to capture shots that otherwise would be hard, if not impossible, to get.

“We’re hoping that we can get up to the pit boxes and maybe get over the wall and try to use that extra length [from the DigiBoom] on the camera to get some cool shots,” he says.

Davies, who says the name “Megalodon” is something Fox Sports invented because of inquiries from media and viewers, acknowledges this type of setup has been used for years but only gained notoriety because of a decision to outfit the rig with a wireless transmitter, making it possible to put live shots on air.

“We think we know what is going to make this thing shine and what's going to add to the broadcast, but until you really see it, you don't know. So it's really going to be fun to see what works in NASCAR,” he says.

IN-CAR AND EXTRA MOTION 

Fox Sports is enhancing in-car race coverage in a couple of ways—with more shots and more frames. Cars are outfitted with four cameras—on the roof, rear bumper, driver’s helmet visor and a driver shot from one of three positions pointed at the driver’s face, says Andy Jeffers, owner of Sports & Entertainment Media, which works with Fox to secure in-car camera sponsorships. As of Feb. 9, the number of in-car cameras stood at 32.

The “more” aspect of the shot count will come from equipping three cars with RF systems that simultaneously transmit feeds from two cameras. “One camera is always on the faces of drivers so we can see what their reactions are,” says Davies, “and another feed from the same car can be used at the same time.”

When it comes to more frames from in-car cameras, Fox Sports will deploy an experimental technology it’s been working on with EVS called “Extra Motion,” a sort of frame rate converter technology that takes 59.94 frame video and interpolates between frames to create new synthetic frames. When played to air, they provide super slow motion replay, says Davies.

To make Extra Motion work, video from the in-car cameras will be sent to the AWS Cloud where the processing needed to interpolate between frames happens. The video, including interpolated frames, will then be sent back to Daytona for integration into the show.

While not exactly real-time, the couple of minutes needed for the roundtrip and processing will ensure the footage is relevant when taken to air. “In NASCAR, if there’s a crash or some kind of stoppage that often means you have a fair amount of time to go back and look at those angles,” says Davies.

Initial iterations of Extra Motion used for pylon-cams during NFL coverage have seen substantially improved turnaround times, says Davies, adding that tests with file footage from in-car cameras “looks incredible.”

COVID-19 WORKFLOW

What won’t be apparent to viewers Sunday is the continuing impact COVID-19 is having on remote production. However, for Fox Sports the broadcasters will be “picking up where we left off back in the spring” [of 2020] as it put in place policies and workflows to protect the production crew from the virus, says Davies.

“We very quickly got together a temporary facility in Los Angeles to do some of the replay and graphics in our old tape vault,” he says. 

Since then that facility has been made permanent and another smaller production spoke in Pittsburgh has come online. Both will be used to augment production resources on site at Daytona and to reduce—if even in a limited way—the number of crew needed at the raceway.

“We are trying to limit the number of people in the truck by putting some of these things elsewhere,” he says. “Replay and graphics are going to be done on site, and they’ll also be done in L.A. and Pittsburgh.”

Replay and graphics operators working remotely from Los Angeles and Pittsburgh will take control of their respective EVS and graphics systems located in the production trucks at the track, viewing proxy video and controlling their systems via the internet, says Davies.  

Other crew members, including craft video editors, radio editors and a live radio mixer, will simply work from home.

However, in some ways Fox Sports is boosting its presence on site compared to last year. “We'll be there in the booth [with talent] and in the pits as we have been in years past,” says Davies. “We're also going to have the producer and director in the truck. Previously, the producer was also in Charlotte.”

Fox Sports coverage of the Daytona 500 is the culmination of a week of race coverage that started Feb. 9 with the Busch Clash at Dayton. More broadly, it’s also the beginning of a new season that will see Fox covering some different tracks like the Circuit of The Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas, and the Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tenn., says Davies.

“What we are looking forward to, to be quite honest, is an amazing season,” he says.

DAYTONA, Fla.—The 2019 Daytona 500 NASCAR stock car race ran for the 61st time in Daytona Beach, Fla., in February and for the first time, Fox Sports Digital produced a “Daytona 500 Infield Party” live to multiple streaming destinations. The live, second-screen experience gave viewers the “inside track” on events taking place behind the scenes during the race.

The Fox Sports Digital production team used Telestream’s Wirecast software for the 4.5-hour multicamera live stream, hosted by Fox Sports commentators Kaitlyn Vincie, Alan Cavanna, and Bob Pockrass, and two-time Daytona 500 winner Michael Waltrip.

MULTILANE STREAMING

To publicize this high-profile Fox Sports broadcast, the event was live-streamed to five sites simultaneously, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Gaming platform Caffeine.TV and the FOXsports.com website.

Normally, whenever the crew operates on a Fox network infrastructure, which provides about 120 Mbps, we have sufficient bandwidth to stream to multiple social/online sites simultaneously. And, as an integrated switching, production and encoding system, Wirecast can output multiple live streams to different online destinations simultaneously as a direct output of the system.

The NASCAR-supplied 15 Mbps bandwidth provided some challenges for five-destination streaming. From within the Wirecast software, we were able to access the Wirecast Restream service from Telestream Cloud to distribute our live signal in real-time to all of the online platforms and audiences we wanted to reach. This capability allowed us to send a single upload stream to the cloud and then have it “re-streamed” to all our destinations from there. All we had to do was enter the target sites into a Wirecast Restream settings window, and the entire CDN process was handled for us from Telestream Cloud.

Wirecast enabled us to deliver our “Infield Party” live stream with the high production standards our viewers expect from Fox Sports. Operationally, it allowed our small, four-person crew to handle all aspects of the live production and streamlined our production costs.

AFTER THE FINISH LINE

The “Infield Party” is just one of the many live streams that Fox Sports produces throughout the year. The network touts 21 consecutive months of growth for video viewing on its social and online platforms, with the “Daytona 500 Infield Party” generating more than 350,000 views.

We plan to use both Wirecast and Wirecast Restream on future live stream remotes for Fox Sports Digital. Upcoming events include other 2019 NASCAR races, as well as the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup from Paris in July. Together, Wirecast and Wirecast Restream have allowed us to deploy an extremely portable, yet highly capable production system allowing our relatively small production crews to do very big things.

Daniela Mayock oversees the technical direction of all original Fox Sports Digital live streams. She can be contacted atDaniela.Mayock@fox.com.

For additional information, visittelestream.netor call 530-470-1300.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The sheer number of possibilities today’s technology puts on the table for television production—especially high-profile ones where there is no dearth of money or people—makes it imperative that the way technology is applied enhances storytelling rather than getting in the way, says Michael Davies, senior vice president of field operations at Fox Sports.

“We are in a technological era where we are sort of in a dream—if you can dream it, you can do it,” says Davies, who this weekend will do his 13th Daytona 500 production. “That creates a lot of opportunities, but it can be a bit of slippery slope.”

This year’s Daytona 500 (Sunday, Feb. 17, starting at 2 p.m. EST on Fox and also livestreamed on the Fox Sports Go app) is a case in point. While Fox Sports will deploy all of the technology normally associated with the production of such a high-profile race, it also aims to enhance coverage with several tech goodies making their Daytona debut, including the high-speed Fox Sports Rail Cam, a body jib, enhanced data analytics and a new 3D virtual studio.

Pre-race, the challenge for Davies and Fox Sports producers and directors is separating the wheat from the chaff when considering technology.

“There certainly are many technologies out there that might seem cool on the surface, but in terms of an actual tool for what the producers and directors actually use and then finally what winds up on the screen, it’s a little bit more of a vetting process,” he says.

“A pretty good way to start [in determining what tech will enhance storytelling] is something called ‘the bar test,’” Davies explains. “The bar test is simply can a viewer understand what we are doing from a technology standpoint while sitting in a bar. And the other thing we determine is whether a technology will show the audience things they just otherwise can’t see.”

The rail cam, which Fox Sports first used at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., and Charlotte Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C., is a good example of the tests.

“It’s often quite difficult to convey on television how fast the cars are going,” says Davies. But the rail cam, the work of robotic dolly specialist Mega Trax, provides a dynamic shot that does the trick.

Positioned behind the inside wall of Turn 2, the camera can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in about three seconds and reach speeds exceeding 90 mph along its 1,000-foot rail.

“Say the camera is going 80 mph and the cars coming out of that turn are going about 180 mph, the shot lets viewers see the foreground and background moving,” he explains.

Another approach is to go against traffic at 80 mph with the cars coming at the camera at 180 mph. “That’s a dynamic shot that looks great,” says Davies.

In terms of passing the tests, not only does the Fox Sports Rail Cam convey speed to the viewers, it also offers a solution for covering the backstretch. “One of the things we always struggle with is covering the backstretch in the most meaningful way,” says Davies.

“We’ll always get everything, but having a camera like this in a place where you don’t generally get a lot of good close-up shots is pretty cool, especially on the inside wall.”

The body jib, commercially branded the DigiBoom from Redrock Micro, is another new production element that passed the tests. At the Daytona 500, Fox Sports will position an operator wearing the body jib inside the pits to capture stabilized cameras shots.

“It’s like a Steadicam,” says Davies. “In fact, I have a Steadicam operator using it. But with this, you can get high—about 6 feet over [what’s being shot]. You can also go right down on the ground, which you can’t do with a Steadicam.”

The body jib and stabilized camera will be used to get a variety of shots providing a new perspective on the race, including shots of the pit boxes at eye-level with the crew chiefs looking on and shots over the wall showing cars coming at viewers as they go to their pit stalls, he says.

Yet another new production addition for this year’s race is a new touchscreen analysts in the booth will use to break down data in ways that have never before been seen in NASCAR, according to Fox Sports.

“The one great thing about NASCAR is you get more real-time data and real-time telemetry than any other sport,” says Davies.

At Daytona, Fox Sports will use loop data NASCAR captures at multiple point on the track to enable analysts to identify important race changes, such as when each driver is making up or losing positions. The touchscreen format will make it possible for Fox analysts to tell accurate stories about the race in near-real time.

The new 60-by-60-foot virtual studio Fox launched for the start of the 2019 NASCAR Cup series also will contribute mightily to the storytelling. The Charlotte, N.C.-based space enables 3D analysis of racetracks, cars and race shops, and will interact with live coverage of the Daytona 500. (Editor’s note: See “New NASCAR Studio Puts Fox Sports in VR, AR Driver Seat.”)

Of course, these new technologies are layered on a well-established complement of tested production technology, which includes seven main mobile production units, two satellite uplinks, 2MW of power independent of local sources, 12 production trucks, 20 manned cameras, three in-track Gopher Cameras, Super Slow Motion HD and 4K cameras, a 1,100-fps X-Mo camera at the start/finish line, 10 high-speed robotic cameras and 12 on-board in-car camera packages.

While Davies is a champion of the technology that will be used to produce the event, he is quick to acknowledge that it’s the people behind the production who ultimately are responsible for telling the best stories of the race.

“We were very lucky to have won a Sports Emmy for Technical Team Remote [in 2018],” says Davies. “What is different about this NASCAR crew is these men and women eat, breathe and sleep the sport. If you go there and start talking to people, it is like a living, breathing history of NASCAR among the people who work on the show.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Fox Sports added a tethered drone to its lineup of production tech innovations to cover the Great American Race, the Daytona 500, from the Daytona International Speedway, Sunday, Feb. 18, on the Fox broadcast network.

Tethered along the backstretch of the speedway, the drone delivered live coverage as it hovered and moved around outside the racing area to deliver new angles on the race. Tethering the drone allowed the broadcaster to extend flight times by eliminating the need to change batteries.

“Each year, Daytona Speedweeks allows us to develop, test and deploy more and more technical enhancements than we are able to do at most other events,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports SVP Field & Technical Operations.

Other enhancements for this year’s race included Fox Sports’ Visor Cam—a Daytona 500 first that’s a small camera clipped to the helmets of two drivers, Kurt Busch and Daniel Suarez; the first fiber NASCAR IP transmission; a variety of stabilized mounts for pit coverage; and a digital mosaic, he added.

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The sports broadcaster relied on a record 14 in-car cameras, including one in the Daytona 500 pace car, which is more than any NASCAR race in the past 15 years, according to Fox. Fox Sports Go delivered an immersive compilation stream of multiple in-car cameras with live telemetry and the Fox Sports streaming app also showed the linear broadcast.

Another bit of production sizzle was delivered via the broadcaster’s touchscreen 3D cutaway car that analyst Larry McReynolds used to give viewers clear explanations of changes to cars. Virtual leaderboards, sponsor enhancements and race summaries displayed on virtual billboards in Turn 3 were created with a combination of camera-tracking technology from Stype and Vizrt 3D graphics.

The production utilized 300 Fox Sports personnel, seven main mobile production units located in the multi-network TV compound at the speedway, a pair of satellite uplinks and mobile generators to deliver 2MW of power separate from local power.

Besides the drone, the production tech included 20 manned cameras, three in-track Gopher Cams, two 6x Sony 4300 super slow motion cameras, one 16x Sony 4800 super slow motion camera, RF cameras and audio from BSI and telemetry and graphics from SMT.

LAGUNA BEACH, CALIF.—It was a photo finish for the 2016 Daytona 500 on Sunday, Feb. 21, with Denny Hamlin winning by .01 of a second. Fox Sports, in partnership with Toyota and NextVR, offered fans a new way to experience the historical race.

This included 360-degree video from Martin Truex Jr.’s car, who finished second behind Hamlin on Sunday. Viewers also had access to a live virtual reality feed of the Daytona 500 with camera angles positioned trackside and in pit stalls. There were also pre-recorded features from the garage, team hauler and television broadcast truck.

Virtual reality coverage of the Daytona 500 was the first event after Fox Sports and NextVR announced a multi-year partnership on Feb. 17.

LAGUNA BEACH, CALIF.—After previously teaming up on virtual reality coverage of Premier Boxing Champions matches in January, Fox Sports and NextVR are announcing a new five-year deal to continue to develop and provide live virtual reality coverage of sporting events.

The two companies have testing virtual reality programming across multiple sports for more than a year, according to NextVR Executive Chairman Brad Allen. Including the boxing matches, Fox Sports previously worked with NextVR for virtual reality broadcasts of the 2015 Auto Club 400 NASCAR race and the 2015 U.S. Open Golf Championship. Future virtual reality programming on Fox Sports will be available on the NextVR portal, which will have a dedicated Fox Sports section.

One of those future broadcasts will include the 2016 Daytona 500. Virtual reality coverage of the race will provide HD virtual reality coverage of the starting line, infield and pit row. The live virtual stream will also include audio commentary and graphics on the race leaders. The 2016 Daytona 500 takes place Sunday, Feb. 21 at 1 p.m.

Samsung Gear VR owners can access the NextVR portal by downloading the NextVR app on any Gear VR headset compatible phone.