The World Cup in Brazil, from 12 June to 13 July, has already been called "The World championship of all the World championships", able to catalyze virtually all the attention of the general tv audience with what is called "the most beautiful football show ever ".
We took the details from the "SKY view" thanks to Vincenzo Flores Head of Production and Operations - FIFA WC Brazil 2014."
July 2014
"The IBC headquarters which gathers all tech department for FIFA 2014 is hosted at the pavilions of the Exhibition Grounds in downtown Rio, in an area of about 160 m². Here SKY set up two separate control rooms.
The first -larger- is devoted to major events, while the smaller is born for news; then there are two editing suites, an editorial room, and an emergency booth to air anything in case of emergency, and a small corner news for a quick interview.
Then in the famous Copacabana beach, across town, a very nice shooting studio was set up, with a sea view.
From here all the signals of the cameras, audio and video returns are sent via 1GB fiber optics to the IBC production centre where the shots are controlled and requested to operators physically 20 miles away.
The shooting system in Brazil is integrated by seven crews equipped with LiveU backpack so that they are able to make reports not only from the stage but also from the cities hosting the World Cup.
An SNG troupe is also involved in Mangaratiba, in charge to shoot the Italian palyers very close to the training ground near Casa Azzurri.
A small control room is used to integrate the international signal produced by the Host Broadcaster HBS and FIFA with SKY cameras to personalize an extra point of view to subscribers.
In every stadium SKY is sending several cameras, two rear goal on the right and left, both in the gallery stands, in the locker room for the interviews in the interval and after the match.
SKY is also employing an Ultra Emotion iMovix extreme slow motion camera (Italian distribution by Aret Video & Audio Engineering) operated by Cinevideo and already used in Serie A matches to ensure definitely spectacular images.
Moreover, in addition to the World feeds we can count on seven unilateral video cameras - always handled by the Host Broadcaster - on which we can cut at will, plus three video cameras on the field for interviews.
The heart of the system is the ability to have in ingest approximately 330 hours plus 200 near live and access to the FIFA MAX server. So the production contribution can count on an incredible number of sources, that includes FIFA MAX, Avid editing systems, and EVS as a central server, as already used in London for the Olympics and Vancouver, then it is an already tested system.
For the World Cup we chose super HD broadcasts with a wider bandwidth and JPEG2000 coding for very high quality images.
For image transports we rely on a fiber connection by Globecast that carries four signals to Italy with a great bandwidth (around 140 MB) in very high quality for both latency and quality and even increased in the second phase of the World Championship (second round, quarter and semi-finals), since there are no more matches overlapped. In practice, at this stage the band will be almost doubled since the two signals are no longer needed for the events along with three returns signals.
As per difficulties, we must mention the main technical logistics, in the sense that Brazil has a serious problem on equipment shipping and initial customs clearance is a nightmare for broadcasters who are undergoing blocks, bureaucratic delays , sometimes even four days, too many for such a tight schedule."
