You’ve seen lots of fast runs on formidable new gear — skis, skates, boards, and sleds — in NBC’s record 418-hour broadcast coverage of the 2006 Games in Torino. And you’ve no doubt noticed the eye-popping ice-themed graphics supporting nearly every frame of the televised events. What you haven’t noticed are the edge-pushing, behind-the-scenes runs by graphics artists, engineers and producers required to move constantly updated just-in-time graphics to air.

It’s Philip Paully’s job to make sure you don’t notice. For Paully, Ph.D, NBC Olympics Director of Graphic Engineering and Operations, who’s covering his sixth consecutive Olympic Games in Torino, speed is everything in being able to seamlessly deliver HD quality broadcast graphics. So in Torino, Paully’s crew has been riding its own formidable new gear, including 15 Power Mac G5 computers running on an Apple Xsan over a Fibre Channel network.

_{Paully monitors graphics traffic in Torino.}

“In covering the Olympics, what’s really crucial to us is getting fast accurate data across to each other,” says Paully. “And being able to share that data. You’ve got to be able to get a graphic when you need a graphic on the air. The Xsan gives us that capability, there’s no doubt.”

Framing the Games

Paully’s team is responsible for creating and delivering the more than 50,000 graphics that introduce, frame, explicate, and generally amplify NBC’s broadcasts. This could be anything from over-the-shoulder images or facts behind Olympics anchors Bob Costas and Jim Lampley to ever-shifting event standings.

“It’s every single graphic that you see on the air,” says Paully. “The wraparounds, statistics, standings panels, all the different lower-thirds, bumpers, animations about how a course works, soup to nuts.” The graphics cover both the shows coming out of NBC’s studio in the International Broadcast Center in Torino and from all of the remote venues.

To create so many templates and variations, Paully, graphic manager Erica Neiges, and artists Dave Barton, Juan Beltre, Matt Celli, and John Schleef (a crew that swells to 50 artists and engineers during the Games) worked with Creative Director Mark Levy. For the past year, they storyboarded, tested, and built images to cover sports that many viewers watch only when the Olympics carry them back to our attention. That means each sport, from slalom to skeleton to curling, requires its own templates, each requiring on-the-fly updating throughout the Games to cover contingencies like judging controversies or orders of presentation. “And nothing is a still graphic, by the way” adds Paully. “Everything’s in motion.”

Now in HD

Unbalancing the production equation even more is that NBC’s broadcasts of the Olympics are now in high-definition. “Moving high definition video takes time,” says Paully. “It’s our heaviest task, to move all that info, unlike standard definition files that we could just move right over. I would say that our average 10-second clip ranges from about a 0.5 GB to 1 GB. And we’re moving a gigabyte in under 10 seconds now, constantly.”

High definition freight has also radically expanded Paully’s storage requirements. “We did the last Olympics with a 4 terabytes central server,” he says. “We wouldn’t go near an HD Olympics with 4 terabytes. It would fill up within the first three or four days.” Even before deploying for Torino, Paully’s artists had created 9 terabytes of pre-built graphics and effects.

Mac-Based Workflow

To devise a complete graphics creation and distribution system, Paully, who’s used Macs in his coverage since the Sydney games in ’00, decided to go with a largely Mac-based system.

“We always go with the standard three-step approach, creation, distribution and playback,” he says. “For creating graphics, we’re using nine dual-processor 2.7GHz G5 [Power] Macs. For distribution, we’re on a 20TB Xsan, comprising seven Xserve RAIDs controlled by two Xserve metadata controllers.

“And for the first time ever, we’ve integrated Macs as playback devices using a product from Broadcast Unifying Gears (BUG TV). We are using three [Power] Mac G5 stations connected to the Xsan to play back HD direct to air. We just drag and drop from the SAN to our three playout Macs, hit a button, and it’s on the air. We’re getting very rock solid, very stable HD playback out of the Macs.”

Paully and his crew, who pre-tested the system in Manhattan before deploying to Torino, are very happy with the performance. “We went non-stop for eleven months on the Xsan without problems, and it’s had a phenomenal effect on how we work,” he says. “There’s no waiting anymore, because everybody sees the SAN as a common drive and they can share all that data on the fly. That’s how efficient it’s become — a big plus.”

And the systems-level yield, says Paully, has been night and day: “During the ’92 games it took us about 48 seconds to render a single frame of video in standard definition. Today we’re doing high-def renders in real time. So we’re doing in eye blinks what it took us a minute to knock out before.”

Dollars and Sense

While considerably speeding up his workflow, his new Mac-based system has allowed Paully to cover an even bigger Olympics, with considerably more airtime, for significantly less cost.

“We’ve been asked to do a lot more with a lot less,” says Paully. “I can now configure a high-def playback-to-air station for under $30,000. In the old days, that would cost us $350,000 per video/key channel. If not for the cost savings of this new Mac-based system, I don’t know how we would have made budget.“

And the Games Begin

After a full year of operation in Manhattan, Paully and crew broke down and shipped their system, about 10 tons of equipment, to the International Broadcast Center in Torino, fully confident that the system would work as well in Torino as it did at home.

“You can spend a year in preparation, but nothing prepares you for what happens once the Games start,” he says. “Once you get in there, you want to have a really smooth running system. And this time, it’s the fastest and the most connected, integrated system we’ve ever built.”