Super Bowl XLVI: The Gear Behind the Game

Many major vendors of equipment and services, including NEP, Sony, Grass Valley, Canon and Level 3, will be playing a key role in the NBC Sports production

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/3/2012 5:25:35 PM

Coverage of Super Bowl XLVI will once again be relying on many of the biggest names in broadcast equipment, with NBC Sports using a wide array of high-end production equipment and services from NEP, Sony, Grass Valley, Canon, Level 3, Calrec, Evertz, EVS and others for the event.

Topping the list of vendors of equipment and services is NEP Broadcasting, which is supplying all the technical facilities for NBC Sports. This will include NEP's ND-3 A, B and C mobile production units, the ND-4 A, B, C and D units and the SS24 HD truck for game coverage.

Equipment in the ND-3 units include a Sony MVS-8000A production switcher, Abekas DVEous digital video effects system, a Grass Valley Trinix HD video router, an Evertz 192 input MVP system, a Calrec Alpha Digital Audio Control with 86 dual layer faders and a Grass Valley Concerto Router

ND-4 has a Grass Valley Kalypso 4 M/E switcher but also uses the Abekas, Grass Valley and Evertz gear.

Other vendors for equipment in the trucks include Sony and EVS for recording and playback systems, Dolby audio encoders and de-coders, and microphones from Sennheiser, Sony and Electrovoice.

NEP's SS24 HD mobile production truck includes a Grass Valley Kalypso Video Production Center switcher, as well as Trinix NXT and Concerto series routing switchers.

NEP's SS25 truck, which will be used for the NFL's World Feed, carries a Grass Valley Kalypso Video Production Center switcher, more than one dozen Grass Valley LDK 8000 Elite WorldCam HD cameras, as well as Grass Valley Trinix and Concerto series routers.

The NEP Denali mobile HDTV truck designed for entertainment events and programming will be used for halftime.

Sony will be providing most of the cameras, mostly Sony HDC-1000s and Sony HDC-1500s.

More than 100 Canon HDTV field lenses and portable zoom lenses will be used for the domestic and international productions.

Canon lenses being used include the XJ100x9.3B and XJ86x9.3B long-zoom lenses designed for "hard" HDTV field cameras.

Canon HDTV lenses mounted on a variety of portable EFP-style cameras, Steadicams, and jib arms will include HJ14ex4.3B wide angle lenses, HJ22ex7.6B lenses and HJ40x14B portable telephoto EFP lenses.

In additional, NBC Sports will be using four NAC Hi-Motion II ultra-motion cameras. They are made by NAC Image Technology and were jointly developed the cameras with Ikegami, which sells and supports the product. The four cameras that will be used this year were supplied by Fletcher Camera & Lenses, which recently purchased 12 of them.

Overall NBC will be using 57 cameras, with 40 devoted to the game coverage and will bring more than 475 people to Indianapolis for the pre-game and game productions.

SportsMEDIA Technology Corporation will provide production enhancements, such as virtual insertion of the yellow first-down line and down-and-distance indicator and other data feeds and tickers.

Once again, Level 3 Communications will be the main provider of transmission services. In total, Level 3 is expecting that more than 3,000 hours of video content will be acquired, encoded and transported across Level 3's Vyvx VenueNet+ platform for Super Bowl coverage. The live game feed will be delivered with the JPEG 2000 format.

In addition to delivering the game, Level 3 will also carry the pre-game and post-game feeds to NFL operations centers in Mt. Laurel, N.J., Culver City, Calif. and NFL Network master control facilities in Atlanta.

Content will also be delivered by Level 3 to other broadcast networks and satellite teleport sites for global distribution.

Overall, Super Bowl XLVI will air in more than 180 countries and territories in over 25 different languages.