University of Miami upgrades with Vizrt and Panasonic

Looking to meet the high standard of the national ESPN3 Sports channel as well as other high-quality outlets, the University of Miami Athletics Department has built two new control rooms and purchased a portable production system to handle coverage of the University’s various sports. The new control rooms, and related studios, have been designed by Panasonic and equipped with Panasonic cameras, production switchers and three one-box graphics solutions from Vizrt.

The new facilities have already been put in place for coverage of the 2015 fall season with 23 broadcasts currently scheduled for volleyball and soccer on ESPN3 using the Vizrt graphics systems.

“These new facilities will help expand the exposure of our sports teams nationally on outlets such as ESPN3,” said Jason Layton, senior associate for Communications & Sales at the University of Miami. “In order to support such high-quality media outlets, it was necessary to upgrade our studios and control rooms. Working with Panasonic and Vizrt has been a very positive experience. We now have the facilities we need to compete for viewers across the country.”

The Vizrt equipment supplied includes three Viz Trio character generators (CG) and three Viz Multiplay multiscreen control packages, one of which is tightly integrated with a NewTek Tricaster system.

Viz Trio is the CG of choice for the University’s live televised events on ESPN3 and other outlets. The university received support from ESPN with a series of graphics templates for use when the school is broadcasting games on the ESPN3 channel. With Viz Trio, the staff can control graphics and video output and make fast changes to content, whenever needed.

Viz Trio and the real-time compositor Viz Engine are also being used as part of a tight integration with the TriCaster, which will be used as a portable system for live remote production from the field.

“These workflow production tools will serve the University of Miami well as provide the flexibility to produce content in a variety of configurations while also maintaining the high quality required for national broadcast television,” said Petter Ole Jakobsen, Vizrt CTO. “We have also had a very good experience working with Panasonic on this integration and learned a lot from each other.”