Inside the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department

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Inside the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department

11/21/2007

By Kevin Schmitt

All of this is in addition to various (and sometimes repetitive) graphic tasks such as compositing athletes' head shots onto motion backgrounds. Naturally, there are myriad challenges involved in supporting that much production, presenting a rapidly moving target as techniques, equipment, and demands evolve and grow.

The first year of JPJ's existence was a constant learning situation for Elvgren and the AVS staff, requiring a healthy amount of trial and error in order to determine workflow and best practices.

One of the major challenges is staffing. With only nine full-time employees, and with a dearth of experienced freelance help in the Charlottesville area, finding the proper manpower for a given event can sometimes present problems. Consequently, AVS relies heavily on a pool of 15 student interns, each giving at least 10 hours a week, to handle a great deal of actual production work--running cameras, editing footage, operating servers, etc.

"Basketball's not so bad because games are [generally] in the evening or on weekends, but when you try to find someone for a 2 [p.m.] baseball game on a Tuesday, I'm glad we have some interns trained because we'd be out of luck otherwise," Elvgren said. "Our interns aren't just extra people to help out; our interns are people we put to work. By the end of the [school] year, they're basically employees."

And there are always future considerations to think about. While the "trial by fire" atmosphere of the last year has produced many solutions, there are looming issues and changeovers to contend with. For example, AVS still produces much of its work in standard definition, albeit much of it at 16:9--football and the weekly show remain 4:3--and all if it digital. But the switch to HD is inevitable, and with so much video being generated, there's also the ongoing issue of archiving. Source tapes are logged and stored, with footage loaded into the Image Server 2000 for live events.

"We hardly roll anything off of tape anymore," said Elvgren. "We load everything into the server and call it up. [But] one of the big things we're hoping to put it next year is a shared storage solution. We're not sure which one we're going with, but we're talking about getting something that will upgrade to HD. We're not HD right now, but we're all-digital 16:9 SDI, so we have a lot of thinking to do there."

While there will always be challenges, the AVS environment provides enormous opportunities to learn and grow. Elvgren said he considers himself a de facto engineer these days, and often serves as such during live events. It's a sea change from his traditional duties as an animator, but Elvgren seems to be taking it all in stride, even as there is very little time to stop and catch his breath--sometimes literally.

"The challenge to us is just managing the volume of workload, [but] I love the rush of live events. One of the things you have to get used to is how many times you have to run up and down stairs in this building. Suddenly, you've done six sets of stairs in an hour. It's a lot of work," Elvgren said, though not without a laugh.

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Kevin Schmitt is a freelance designer and writer based in Waynesboro, VA. He can be reached at 1105@ksdd.com.

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Kevin Schmitt, "Inside the University of Virginia's Athletics Video Services Department," Campus Technology, 11/21/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=56171

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