University of Portland Leverages IP Tech, Student Crews in Biggest Year of Live Productions Yet
By Adam Noyes
By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Recently, the university moved away from a flypack model and cut the ribbon on a centralized control room in the Chiles Center, the program’s basketball arena.
Currently, the control room is built around a NewTek TriCaster 860 production switcher with Advanced Edition and features a NewTek 3Play 425 for replay (Nevarez is also experimenting with a touchscreen replay system developed by a local Portland startup), a Yamaha audio console, and a Clear-Com system for comms. LiveText is typically used for graphics on a TheW.tv broadcast. Producing games for CSN Northwest, however, the team taps into the RSN’s graphic package through a ChyronHego Lyric Pro.
Signals from across campus come into the control room’s production switcher via NDI technology, allowing Nevarez and the team to tap into the campus’s fiber infrastructure.
“NDI has been awesome,” says Nevarez. “It’s definitely helped us expand in areas that we didn’t think we could expand to. Our campus, like most university campuses, is completely networked, and we have a pretty vast network that allows us to access ports pretty much wherever we need. It’s allowed us to feed stuff from virtually anywhere on campus [to the centralized control room] if we need to.”
The Portland Sports Network has grown so much over the past couple of years, Nevarez notes, that the centralized control room has become a regular part of many Pilots coaches’ recruiting pitches.
“The value comes in the branding,” he points out. “Our coaches go out to recruits and can say we’re on television X number of times per year. It’s a huge recruiting tool.”…..