Blackmagic Design video hardware for Valencia Club de Fútbol’s Mestalla Stadium

Blackmagic Design has announced that Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF) is providing fans an enhanced match day experience following an overhaul of the Mestalla Stadium’s live production capabilities using Blackmagic Design video production hardware.

The Spanish La Liga side was looking for a scalable system that would allow it to supply different feeds to five big screens and stack graphics over a live background video. Based on these requirements, and after an assessment of the options, IDCromvideo developed a flexible and powerful solution built around Blackmagic devices, according to Julio Tárrega who is responsible for audiovisual at the Mestalla Stadium, home to Valencia CF.

“We used to have a single scoreboard with a computer to output graphics over DVI and a live SDI feed from the broadcaster. We’d swap between those two signals using a switcher,” he explains. “Now we manage four live feeds, three cameras, an additional signal from the broadcaster as well as two video playout systems and a further two LiveCG Football character generators, all of which needs to be routable to any of the five scoreboards around the Stadium.”

Although each scoreboard has its own dedicated ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K switcher, Valencia CF need to have one operator who could control of all the various feeds in order to optimise switching, and when necessary synchronise outputs across all the scoreboards.

“Using Blackmagic’s SDK, IDCromvideo developed an application for touchscreen devices that allows our operators to select feeds and send them to one of the switcher program outputs or downstream keyers,” said Tárrega. “In addition, we needed to preview and capture all of the sources displayed on the five scoreboards and so equipped the gallery with a Blackmagic MultiView 16. We use a second of the Blackmagic hardware multiviewers alongside a H264 recorder to produce a master of all our content.

“As a football club we’ve always been committed to providing spectators on the terraces with dynamic, engaging audiovisual content,” concludes Julio. “The ability to key titles over a live background was essential to our plans and that is why we opted for a workflow built around Blackmagic’s ATEM production switchers.”