The rallying cry of “Attention all sand addicts, duners, and dirtheads” resonated loud and clear in the YouTube event announcement for Polaris Camp RZR, one of the biggest dune gatherings of the year. It was the first serve in a social media volley that amplified the fan experience throughout the three-day recreation event. The annual event celebrates the sport and the machines, taking place at the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area near Glamis, California. The location is roughly two hours east of San Diego in a region considered the Mecca of North American sand dune recreation.

The reputation of the event and the region was enough to draw thousands of enthusiasts this year, driving everything from backyard quads to full-blown desert racers. Overnight, attendees transformed Glamis Beach into a massive campsite as the event prepared to open on Halloween day.

Those preparations included the installation of three video walls and a fully loaded digital production facility. Alpha Sports TV, experts in delivering specialized broadcast content for sports and live events, provided the production front-end and handled content creation and delivery. This included playout of sponsor advertisements and more than 30 special features, as well as live content captured on a roving, wireless Sony HXC100 camera with embedded audio.

“A lot of what we did involved processing literally terabytes of media files, primarily video, from many different sources,” said Andrew Allan, president of Alpha Sports TV. “We made sure that the high-quality content we processed was rendered in equally high quality with no artifacts, even though outdoor video walls are quite tolerant of high compression. We needed to make sure all the content, whether from an outside source or acquired live on-site, ultimately looked the same in terms of aspect ratio and overall quality.”

Allan points out that many production companies can handle this, but Alpha Sports TV, with its history in Olympic Games and other high-profile events, was brought in for its expertise in integrating graphics, video, and data into live broadcasts and events. This was especially important for the social media aspect, which proved to be a major attraction and source of engagement for attendees. The social media gateway was opened courtesy of software from Bannister Lake, a graphics and broadcast automation specialist. Allan integrated Bannister Lake’s TweetOut and TweetOut Nano products into the workflow to keep screen content refreshed and dynamic.

Allan ran TweetOut on the Ross Video XPression Studio platform, creating Twitter and Facebook routines for several different graphics layouts including insertion over the prerecorded Polaris features. This included full-page and lower-third layouts, the former of which could take advantage of TweetOut’s inline photo support.  This means that the full-page graphics space was mostly reserved specifically for photos taken by attendees with their “feet on the ground.” Those photos were stored in the Flow database along with tweets and other data content, and made available for output into the lower-third layouts.

Room to Spread

The TweetOut Nano solution essentially offers users a compact form factor for integrating social media content into live broadcasts – especially ideal for temporary facilities where rack space is limited. Allan likens its size to “a few decks of cards,” noting that it’s very quick, reliable, and networkable. “We can conceivably have several different ‘content moderation clients’ networked into the switch, all providing their own social media contributions to the stream,” said Allan.

At the Polaris event, the TweetOut software constantly polled Twitter and Facebook content based on search parameters, including several different hashtags provided by Polaris. The production team regularly received hits based on those hashtags. A built-in interface allowed for downstream editing of content that was raw or inappropriate. From there, the content went straight into XPression.

That flexibility to moderate streams with simplicity also meant that Allan could focus on higher-end production aspects, including live camera feed monitoring and on-the-fly graphics creation.

“I like to have all these different components broken out into modular functionalities, which is why we have TweetOut Nano dedicated to managing the raw data,” said Allan. “That way when there is someone on site who can help, we can put them in front of the Nano box to moderate the content. Everything that comes from the Nano into my Ross XPression has been pre-moderated. That relieves me from having to keep my eye on four different machines.”

Flow Motion

The complete workflow included transcoding tools from Handbrake and Adobe for format conversion, and a temporary site-wide satellite broadband solution for local WiFi device connections so that attendees and participants could engage and connect via social media. The combined output of video, graphics and social media was ultimately output through a Ross Carbonite switcher, which, along with the videowalls, Sony camera and RF hardware – including six antennae spread around the site for camera feed transmission – was provided under a contract with Screenworks.

The broadband link was partitioned for private and public use. This ensured that Alpha Sports TV wouldn’t lose its slice of the bandwidth if attendees swamped the network.

“Nano doesn’t require much bandwidth at all – it’s purely XML data, and as such doesn’t cause any bottlenecking in terms of data throughput,” said Allan. “It was essentially an input into the Carbonite switcher, networked with one of the laptops running XPression. We used a third laptop for standalone Xpression graphics, which were basically content layouts built in advance so we could quickly post updated event schedules.”

Elsewhere, Allan notes that aspect ratio was an interesting challenge. All video content was delivered to Alpha Sports TV in HD 16:9, while the main giant screen was SD 4:3. To compensate, videos were formatted for HD and letterboxed to the screen to avoid loss of content. The screen's huge size allowed the letterboxing to be an acceptable compromise.

Ultimately, turning the typical event production into a “SocialTV” experience was an important step. “You can very quickly tell when people catch on to tweets and social media activity on the screens, because the comments quickly increase in quantity,” said Allan. “If you make it clear that you’re looking for photos and things to accompany tweets, it comes fast and furious. That’s really what you want to see out of an event like this, and we had the right tools in place to out as much content as possible.”

For more information:

Alpha Sports TV

Sony HXC100 Camera

Bannister Lake (now part of Ross)

Handbrake transcoding tools

Adobe transcoding tools