NASHVILLE—The mobile and REMI production company TNDV has announced that it headed south into Mexico to live-produce the three-day 2025 Zane Grey Championship Playoffs, a sport fishing tournament streamed live on ESPN+ from October 18-20.
For the production, TNDV shipped a REMI flypack and camera jib to the production site in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico for what was the company’s first live-to-air project outside the United States.
TNDV managed all content acquisition and live set audio for the streaming broadcasts over all three days, delivering live, three-hour program feeds to the TCL REMI broadcast facility, located at The Plex production facility in Fort Worth, Texas. TNDV leveraged SRT connectivity for secure, low-latency signal transport between the two points, ensuring a consistent near-real-time feed for all live broadcasts, reported the company, which is part of the Live Media Group.
TNDV’s custom flypack kit included four Kokusai Denki HD cameras for video capture and Haivision Makito X H.264 encoders for SRT transport, plus Sennheiser MD46 handheld mics and HMD 27 headsets for talent audio. Commentators on the live set used personal Model 214A announcer’s consoles from Studio Technologies, a Dante-enabled audio product that eliminates talkback, delays and other problems that interfere with discussion and intelligibility. This was a bit of a changeup from TNDV’s previous work with the TCL REMI team, which typically handles commentary locally.
“TCL’s usual strategy of producing commentary in-house removes all video and audio delay concerns,” said Rob Devlin, President, TNDV. “The commentators for this event would often talk about what they are seeing on TV, and they needed to hear themselves in real-time rather than on a two-second delay from flowing to the control room and back. The announcer’s consoles remove those distractions, and since we provide our own audio feed we use them to manage each commentator’s mix.”
While the live set was staged in an open-air plaza by the action, TNDV had to get creative in other areas. The sole TNDV technician onsite, Devlin transformed a hotel conference room into a temporary control room that was almost precisely 300 feet from key acquisition and production points. That kept home runs for all cables within the distance threshold, including dedicated camera cables and Cat5 for audio. key components included an AJA router, Haivision encoding and camera engineering gear.
Three of the Kokusai Denki cameras were arranged in fixed positioned along the shoreline, while the fourth was added to a jib for live set coverage. And since no truck was required for the production workflow, shipping a jib required another dose of creative thinking, TNDV explained.
“Jib systems are largely built on site at events using barbells as a counterbalance to camera weight, which keeps everything nice and level,” said Devlin. “Shipping barbells amounts to extremely expensive shipping weights. We developed the idea of using water weights, which means shipping empty bags and adding 250 pounds of water on-location. That made it feasible to ship an 18-foot arm, which was the ideal size for this event.”
Devlin also explained that driving a truck to Cabo San Lucas, located on the southern tip of Baja California, proved impractical for both business and technology reasons. “It’s a 20-hour drive from San Diego to Baja California, and there are desert roads all along that route,” said Devlin. “The fuel savings alone made sense, but the expense of sending a full truck crew for a modest-sized production didn’t equate. We restructured an existing TNDV flypack to meet size and weight parameters, and TSA and FAA air shipping requirements. Our flypacks have grown in popularity for many reasons, but this project was a prime example of positioning the flypack as an economical choice.”
More information is available at www.tndv.com.
