Exclusive: a look around ESPN's 3D Master Control room
By Darren Murph 
posted June 11th 2010 2:08PM
posted June 11th 2010 2:08PM
One important piece that has yet to be revealed to the public is exactly how this material is getting from the field to the consumer, with Comcast, DirecTV and AT&T (U-verse) signed on from day one. During our shooting for The Engadget Show (don't worry -- we'll be cutting it up and getting it live as soon as possible!) we were able to stop by ESPN's 3D Master Control room, a box no larger than the average American kitchen but infinitely important in the grand scheme of things. Amazingly enough, the room pictured in the gallery below didn't exist six weeks ago, and in an insanely short period of time ESPN has managed to create a control room that sucks feeds in from all over the world, adds graphics (along with a specialized ESPN 3D "bug"), ensures that everything is aligned properly and then pipes it out to the aforesaid carriers.
We sat a spell in the room, which mainly consisted of a few computers to handle the processing, a monitor that displayed the left and right feeds individually and a 3D display for sampling what's going out to the glasses-equipped world. What struck us as most incredible was just how much magic was happening in this single room. We're confident that ESPN's 3D control room(s) will grow in size as more and more events are shot in 3D, and if our initial impressions of its fantastic handling of a feed that wasn't even shot by ESPN (all of the 3D World Cup matches are fed in by HBS, in a European format to boot), we doubt it'll be long before that uncontrollable expansion begins.
Only 6 weeks old, but they still have a keyboard from 1996.
Anyone know where I can get that wallpaper that is black/red and has ESPN in the lower right?
What brand of speakers are those? Of course a list of all the equipment wold be nice :)
@capwkidd
No idea about the speakers, however, can identify most of the rack mounted equipment and the VTR from stuff that I have/do use, from left to right;
VTR looks like a Sony SRW-5500 HDCAM deck, probably for backup playout.
Under the first monitor is an RTS Talkback panel, allows communication with other areas inside the building.
Under the next monitor you have an Evertz CP-2232E system control panel, to be honest these can control a pretty varied range of equipment so wouldnt really want to hazard a guess what its doing. Under that is a Grass Valley Encore Router control panel, used for switching video/audio feeds.
On the desk in front of that to the right of the second keyboard looks like an evertz multiview controller but not sure. To the right of that is a Leitch digital clock/countdown controller, these are fairy common in most control rooms and just help the staff time manual events etc.
Below the third monitor looks like more Grass Valley/Evertz gear although I don't straight away recognise what they are.
Below the fourth monitor looks like a video playout server control panel, although most of the servers can be controlled from a PC, most operators prefer these panels which are a little more intuitive and often faster to use.