How do you produce a live streaming event in a remote location with no production infrastructure in a sensitive ecosystem that needs to be protected?
That was the challenge facing Red Bull Media when they approached RCS in May 2019. That same month, Red Bull’s annual Cape Fear Surfing Championship was to be held in Tasmania, 150 miles off the southeast coast of mainland Australia. With a unique ecosystem and a long list of protected species, Tasmania has a rich aborgional history and distinct culture that values respect for the land above all else. While RBM is renowned for staging extreme events, they are also conscious of minimising their environmental impact and that was central to this challenge.
RCS proposed a completely new graphics workflow that enabled Red Bull Media to send the bare minimum of crew and kit to Tasmania. Ultimately, only a small camera crew and data loggers were required on site. This represented the absolute bare minimum of staff and meant a massive reduction in shipping, flights and accommodation all of which reduced costs and the overall environmental impact of the event.
The live video and data feeds from Tasmania were sent back to the Red Bull production hub in Santa Monica, California, over 8,000 miles (12,780 km) away.
RCS worked with the on-site data provider Compusurf to integrate their live data into custom Singular HTML overlays that were created for the event. The graphics package included a full suite of elements such as a full screen leaderboard, mini leaderboards, lower panels and side slabs. An RCS custom data interface was created using AWS that enabled the production crew in Santa Monica to receive live data from Compusurf in Tasmania directly into the Singular overlays, which were being operated from California.
The video feeds were produced using vMix (which is natively compatible with Singular) so the production crew simply mixed the video and added Singular overlays in one interface.
The produced feed with video and graphic overlays was then streamed to Red Bull’s web portal.
Working with RCS, Red Bull Media demonstrated that a live event can be produced remotely with major cost savings and environmental benefits despite huge distances between the event and the production facility.
In addition, because a major part of the production was cloud based, there was no graphics or video switching hardware to ship and the remote production crew simply logged out from a web browser at the end of the production.
