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Super Bowl XL will be played in Detroit this Sunday (2/5/06), and ABC will cover the event, with a complement of HD gear that's more sophisticated than any in broadcast history. Expected to attract more than 130 million viewers in the US and a billion worldwide, the showcase production will feature a few brand-new tricks performed by the ABC broadcasters. Supporting the big-budget TV show will be advertisements that will sell this year for a record $5 million per minute.
Covering the extravaganza will be a village full of television engineers, camera people, and 10 production trucks (29 vehicles in all), packed to the gills with HD gear. The lead company of the project is NEP Supershooters from Pittsburgh, a division of NEP Broadcasting, with three trucks contributing to the effort. ABC will be using 36 cameras to cover the game, all of them HD this year. For the occasion, ABC will also bring in the truck that's used to cover Sunday Night Football on ESPN. A third truck from NEP will be used to cover the pre- and post-game broadcasts.
The trucks will employ 20 hard cameras for the broadcast, Thompson Grass Valley LDK 6000 mk II Worldcam cameras with Canon lenses, many which will be equipped with optical image stabilization technology. The longest of those lenses will be 100x. There will be six super SloMo units, and seven hand-held cameras. Two of the super SloMo cameras will be on the sidelines, along with a Steadicam. A unique aspect of this year's production will be the two wireless HD cameras on the sidelines, which is no small feat due to the wide bandwidth required for high definition wireless transmission. As usual, two remote-controlled cameras will be on the goalposts, and additionally there will be two robotic cameras on the goal lines and a Skycam suspended above the stadium with cables attached to four points of the compass. That camera will be controlled by one operator who's designated as the pilot and another who is the actual camera operator. In its first experimental use will be Sony's 3x Super SloMo camera, a unit that captures video at 180 frames per second. To put this large number of cameras in context, a typical Monday Night Football broadcast uses 25 cameras. There were even more cameras used in last year's effort, where Fox fielded 54 cameras, although not all of those were high-definition.
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| The main production trucks for the broadcast will be NEP's Supershooter 26A and 26B. There will be a total of 29 vehicles for the production, including 10 production trucks on the site. |
During the game, ABC will be using Apple's Final Cut Pro to put together HD packages on the fly, along with five Avid Symphony nonlinear editing systems which will be used for editing packages for the pre-game show. As it usually does, ABC will use for its instant replay systems a disk-based replay system from Belgian company EVS, and will deploy Chyron Duet character generators and Autodesk Inferno for its on-air graphics.
ABC will be sending all of this video up to a C-Band satellite for worldwide broadcast, and will also use Vyvx fiber on the ground to send a signal back to its New York broadcasting headquarters. The company plans to use both high-definition and standard-definition transmission paths. ABC plans to use 90 miles of cable, and engineers were concerned before the setup about how the stadium was not, as they called it, "Super Bowl friendly." Many of the more modern stadiums allow the enormous production trucks to park inside, but not so with Ford Field in Detroit. Weather has been unseasonably warm in the area, though, but because of concern that temperatures might be well below freezing at game time, ABC has decided to run its cables through a window in the side of the building instead of through a single access point through one tunnel.
Drew Esocoff, who is ABC's director for Monday Night Football, will be at the helm for the Super Bowl XL broadcast for ABC, the second time he's directed the broadcast in his career -- his first Super Bowl being in 2003 for ABC. Al Michaels will announce the game, along with John Madden who will offer color commentary, and Michelle Tafoya and Suzy Kolber will be sideline reporters for the show. While Madden is a Super Bowl veteran -- this will be his 10th Super Bowl -- it's the first Super Bowl outing for Tafoya and Kolber. But this marks the final NFL broadcast for ABC after 36 seasons, because the network?s Monday Night Football program will be going to ESPN next year. No big loss, though, since both ABC and ESPN are both owned by parent company Disney.
Is the network ready? Are they nervous? Producer for ABC Sports Fred Gaudelli told reporters from WXYZ in Detroit that there might be a few butterflies the night before the big show on Sunday, but then when the game starts, momentum takes over. ?Saturday night it will probably be a little bit tough getting to sleep because you have so many things running through your mind, all the things you want to make sure are tightly wound together,? Gaudelli said. He added, ?But once they actually start to play the game, then it becomes the game and you start doing that in the butterflies go away, hopefully.?
The $5 million-per-minute advertisements will be dominated by the biggest spender, Anheuser-Busch, which purchased ten 30-second spots. The next biggest ad buy was from Pizza Hut, which also bought ten 30-second spots, but many of those were not scheduled to run during the big game itself. Pepsi-Cola was in third with four spots, along with Procter & Gamble also with four. Sprint and Warner Bros. each bought three spots during the game. There will be three 60-second ads during the game, bought by General Motors, Burger King and ESPN. The big winner in ad agencies producing these extravagant miniature motion pictures was agency BBDO, which was responsible for 19 of the spots airing on the Super Bowl this year.
Here's a chart that lists the advertisers for Super Bowl XL. http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=47348
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