BirdDog and NDI Power F1 eSports Facility
By Jennifer P
Tateside were approached to design the AV system for a cutting edge E Sports facility within the F1 teams HQ. As well as the space being used by the teams Esports drivers, it would also be used for sponsor events and corporate days. The AV system had to be flexible and dynamic, enabling staff to switch content from high frame rate gaming, sponsor logo’s to real time camera feeds. The four gaming rigs were the focus of the room, each having a 2×2 video wall situated behind them on a curved wall.
Early on in the design process we had settled with NDI as the protocol for the video distribution and management. Having implemented it on a number of other projects we were confident it was more than capable. It gave us great flexibility to work with a number of cool brands and create a homogenous solution. We used three NDI bullet cams on each rig, one to capture the drivers face, another to capture the hands on the steering wheel and a third on the foot pedals. This ensured we could add some real emotion to the broadcast experience. We brought back the gameplay from the gaming rigs via NDI using the Newtek Screen capture software. This helped ensure there was no extra load on the gaming computers GPU (scaling the output to a lower resolution ready for a more traditional HDMI over IP solution).
We pushed video content back to the four video walls using NDI with the help of the 4K BirdDog decoders which then fed into DataPath FX4’s. With all of these sources and end points we needed a software control solution that not only offered NDI and Dante routing but also the added production features to broadcast game play to various streaming services. We chose vMIX which runs on all 4 engineer stations. This allows the engineers to send any content from each game PC, mix between cameras and go between full screen and split screen configurations whilst maintaining a separate broadcast mix. We achieved this with a number of pre defined layouts being triggered by Elgato Stream decks which ensure operation can be as simple as a physical button press.
On top of these 16 screens that form the video wall there were a further six screens in the space showing a mixture of driver profiles and partner logos. The signage and content triggering was taken care of by Brightsign players. They received UDP commands from Crestron with a JSON module that we designed for quick dynamic label updates. A Bose EX processor dealt with Dante audio, routing multiple sources from DVS running on both the gaming rigs and engineer stations. A double 10” Bose subwoofer and two Arena match Utility speakers ensured the audio sounded as good as the room looks.
Read the full Case Study from Tateside HERE
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