Stuart Scott will be flanked by two ultra high-end projection screens on the new “SportsCenter” set and surrounded by 4,000 fiber-optically linked lights on the studio floor. The only thing is, he won’t be allowed to wear shoes. Booties are fine. Slippers maybe. But no shoes.
In high definition, which the show steps up to on June 7, every little blemish is visible on screen. Tiny scratches will make the floor look like crinkled waxed paper, and dirt tracked in from the harsh New England winter will visually turn the set into the bottom of a bird cage.
The floor is just one of the worries at ESPN’s new 120,000-square-foot Digital Center in Bristol, Conn., which cost an estimated $100 million or more to build and officially opens for business with the “SportsCenter” high-definition debut. ESPN executives said the show’s hosts are borderline panicked over their own facial imperfections, fearing that shaving nicks and pimples now obscured by makeup and the limits of standard definition will soon be lampooned by viewers. Technology will be employed to make their faces slightly out of focus.
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| The 120,000-square-foot Digital Center, which cost an estimated $100M, will open June 7. |
“The talent is very concerned about high definition,” said Ted Szypulski, director of engineering special projects at ESPN, and one of the confessed tech geeks who helped design the center. “I have certainly had my share of calls from them.”
When the network decided to go digital in 1998, high definition wasn’t even in the blueprints. The purpose of the new broadcast facility was to leave the analog world behind and to edit, archive and broadcast in a virtually tapeless environment.
It was not until the summer of 2002 that a decision was made to launch an HD channel and wire the entire building with that in mind.
Now, ESPN is turning a corner into the broadcasting world of the future, one where the finer details are as exact as the ones and zeroes behind every image.
The “digital conversion,” as it’s referred to internally, is not just an occasion to keep the set a little cleaner (a local company will polish it daily). It actually represents a complete overhaul of virtually every production function at ESPN. In the process, the network’s corporate culture itself is about to change.
Tape worms
The talent on “SportsCenter” has generally worn shoes to this point, but the other heart and soul of the show — the young production assistants and editors working behind the scenes — wear sneakers.
That’s because they’re constantly running, sprinting sometimes, with videotapes in their hands. They’re grabbing tapes from ESPN’s vast library of more than 1 million hours of sports footage. They’re shuttling completed highlight tape to a control room for playback. In all there are more than 500 videotape machines on the campus, and the only things that connect them are human hands and feet.
Today, as you read this, there’s a dark windowless room in “Building One” in Bristol, where a group of twenty-something recent college grads are hovered over 24 television monitors. They’re watching sports — in fact, every major league game played in North America, 220 hours worth a day each weekday, double that on weekends.
These production assistants got their jobs with ESPN right out of college by passing a sports quiz, and have seven months to prove themselves as temporary employees, earning about $10 an hour. It’s part training, part initiation ritual, part sports boot camp.
“For a lot of these kids, getting paid to watch sports on TV is a pretty cool thing, but there is a lot of unproductive time that goes with that,” said Robert Eaton, who heads all of ESPN’s studio productions as senior vice president and managing editor.
When something interesting happens in a game, they write it down and log the exact second.
As soon as the game ends, they hand that piece of paper and a tape of the game to an editor, who is hidden away in one of 22 editing suites tucked throughout the building. The editor starts piecing together a highlights package.
The production assistant then might spend time logging other tapes into the ESPN library, a daily and arduous ritual. Then if the highlight calls for some archival footage to be spliced in, one of those PAs is sent running through the campus to pull it from the library. Every second counts in order to get it on the next “SportsCenter.”
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| A worker prepares the new “SportsCenter” set for its high-definition debut next week. |
And there’s a tape, one tape, with all the highlights. If “Baseball Tonight” or ESPN News wants a piece of that tape, they have to wait until “SportsCenter” is done. Maybe it will have to go through a few generations, degrading with each reproduction.
Divine design
There’s no real order to how things are laid out in ESPN’s existing facilities.
“Over the years we grew so much,” Szypulski said, “it was like ‘there’s a closet there, let’s put an editing suite.’”
He shares this, of course, to point out the contrast between the labyrinth that is Building One and the giant windowed highlights room in the new center. It will be filled with ergonomically designed work stations and surrounded by state-of-the-art, and centrally located, editing suites.
There’s a sound mixing room in the Digital Center with a subwoofer so large it can send a thud through the entire building. “Master control” facilities can power 10 different networks and insert local commercials for each. There’s a teaching room and a giant 9,000-square-foot studio that now sits empty but soon will house “Baseball Tonight,” “College Gameday” and every ESPN studio show other than “SportsCenter.” Each will have its own set in a different corner but will share a green fiber-optic floor at the center that lights up to look like a basketball court or football or baseball field.
And for the PAs, the lowly PAs, soon they’ll fleet video clips around ESPN simply by hitting “enter.”
The entire company has been liberated from the tyranny of the tape.
The system also means PAs no longer will spend hours labeling tapes and trudging around the campus.
“Instead of thinking, ‘I have to finish this shot and run and get it over there,’” Eaton said, “they can spend that five minutes cutting a better highlight. We’re trying to give people more time to be productive and less time doing the mundane crap.”
But if they do step in any mundane crap, they just need to remove their shoes before walking on the set.
