Wimbledon 2024: NEP’s Sam Broadfoot talks challenges, control and crew

The gallery on one of NEP’s flagship OB trucks, Venus, running Centre Court

The Wimbledon Championship is a continuously evolving event from a broadcast perspective for host broadcaster Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS). The production involves hundreds of crew, many of which are bought in by technical services provider for the host broadcast, NEP.

Here, NEP UK’s technical project manager, Sam Broadfoot, speaks to SVG Europe about how the company stays on top of the technical progression of Wimbledon each year, as well as how the entire team is kept happy.

Were there any particular challenges for you at Wimbledon this year?

There’s always challenges. I mean, Wimbledon always likes to progress every year, the same as NEP; we don’t just sit back and regurgitate what we did last year. We have plenty of meetings, which we use to try and make things better, like what they’ve done with their Access All England feed; the number of cameras changed and how they wanted to use them… obviously we had a drone this year, which I thought was great. They moved a rail cam inside of Centre Court, which gave you a view that people have never seen before; I’ve been lucky enough to be pretty much everywhere around Wimbledon, but for the viewers at home that have never been there, they wouldn’t necessarily see how the grounds look from different angles and how close you are to the city.

I think the challenges now were more to do with the amount of bandwidth we needed with a lot more people taking HDR. The trucks are in UHD HDR, so you’ve got to think about what needs to be in UHD and is going to be going through those trucks, and what’s not and doesn’t need to be, because you don’t want to be doing everything in UHD.

Long shot of Wimbledon Park during Wimbledon 2024, featuring one of NEP’s Sony 3500 cameras. NEP camera operator, Jacob Spires, bravely makes the vertical climb to set up this shot each year

We have the TR-ACE courts in SDR, which adds a third format that we need to be aware of and how that works and where we archive it.

We have a petabyte of storage on site just for the media from our central content store. So there’s managing all of that too, which is quite complicated.

With so much going on, how do you get then maintain control of it all?

There’s a lot of feeds. It is very easy to make a mistake on something where there’s so many things going on. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a big mistake, but you might get your cleans and your dirties around the wrong way, or your Camera One is actually from the next court that looks identical.

Read more Wimbledon 2024: NEP on managing the megalith that is Wimbledon Championships

So it is going through the checks; I spend the Thursday pre-Championships doing a FACs check, but it literally takes all day. I start in Centre Court and make sure that every camera is working in the right place, that the tallies work, that it sits on the monitor stacked in the right place, that the vision mixer cuts the right thing, that the EVS’s can record the right one, that the graphics are right, that the interfacing we’ve got with Hawkeye works and their talkbacks are fine, and the engineers can control it; I think I started at 10 o’clock on that Thursday and finished at about five in the afternoon.

I literally go through every single directors seat throughout the building. If you don’t do that, you can have an issue. You pick up little things like returns on a camera might be the wrong one. It’s an easy mistake to make when you’re routing – I can’t remember what the numbers are, but I think there’s like 10,000 routes that need to be made – you’re going to get some of them wrong. We have to go through that really rigorous testing process to make sure that anything that does get missed is so minor, it doesn’t matter, if you see what I mean; you can then fix it on air, but you’ve ruled out all of the big issues by going through it thoroughly.

Obviously the engineers do their checks before me, and once I’ve finished, the directors go for their rehearsals so they can pick anything else up. The goal is that the first Monday is as smooth as it can be because everything is then already working and fully tested.

Your systems and galleries need to be easy for people to use as well, don’t they?

Yes. You need to make sure that everyone understands all parts of the system they’re in control of; if it’s sound mixers or vision mixers or directors, they need to walk into any of the galleries and it all needs to feel right and needs to work in the same way. You can’t have different galleries going off and doing their own thing.

Every director goes around and does three to five galleries depending on how their shifts work, and the same with the sound mixers; they need to know the faders are in the same place and the EQs and compressions are done in the same way. It makes it easier for everybody, which then keeps the morale high.

How important is the team’s morale on a job like Wimbledon?

It’s a tough job. People are on site for 12 hours a day fairly regularly, and the team morale is quite key on a job of this size. I think we had 430-odd people that were working for NEP just on the host side of things.

Having the right people, having the team morale nice and high, it just makes it a better place to be and a nicer place to work, and Wimbledon are on board and understanding in that sense too. You can have sensible conversations around crewing levels and shift patterns, which is good in this day and age when other projects involve slashing the budgets and working people as hard as you can.