Game overview: At this year's Champion Skins Game, held January 17 - 18, partners Ben Crenshaw and Fuzzy Zoeller outshot the other teams (including Greg Norman and Jay Haas, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, Gary Player and Bernhard Langer) conquered the course at the Royal Ka'anapali Golf Club and walked away with 13 skins and $530,000, the largest Champion skins win on record.

Technical overview: ESPN Regional Television produced the event that aired on ESPN Feb 28 and March 1. The production team used state of the art technology from Bexel Broadcast Services to digitally capture every sight and sound in high definition on Panasonic's P2 format. "We knew we had a month from the time the event was played to the time it aired and wanted to use technology to improve our workflow giving our production team as much flexibility as possible," commented Steve Cozort, ESPN Regional Television's Senior Director of Operations. Cozort added, "We had tested the Panasonic P2 to Avid workflow on our Remax Long Drive event in late 2008 and with its successful implementation and ease of use, we confidently made the decision to move forward with this work flow for one of our signature events."

ESPN Regional Television and Bexel Broadcast Services designed a complete end-to-end digital tapeless solution for this and future events providing an alternative approach to tape delayed events. Bexel also delivered a solution for video capture, audio recording and a transcoding workflow from the DVCProHD codec.

Bexel's equipment list for recording video included five Panasonic HPX-2000 P2 ENG cameras, three Sony HDX-1500 camera chains and three Panasonic HPM-110 mobile recording and edit stations. "The approach to covering this tournament ENG style provided some unique challenges and our partnership with Bexel allowed us to work through this new approach and come up with solutions that allowed for a seamless transition from a normal truck production," stated ESPN Operations producer Luther Fisher. The Sony HDX-1500 allowed the camera operators the flexibility they needed on the course, while the Panasonic HPM-100 recorded the video digitally in the P2 format. Each hard camera had an accompanying video operator and mobile shading position built into a standard golf cart. "The small equipment footprint enabled us to build three unique and functional operating positions requested by each video operator," stated Fisher.

Bexel ASG, Bexel's premier audio specialties subsidiary, developed their own unique workflow in order to accommodate all the standard needs of a golf show without having a truck type infrastructure. Eight player microphones (Sennheiser SK250's) were isolated to a Sound Device 788T 8-Track Digital Recorder in addition to being down-mixed to two channels of each of the five Panasonic HPX-2000's. The three announcers were also calling the golf live from the course via Sennheiser SK250's with Countrymen E6 microphones as well as having an IFB from both the producer and mixed feeds of the players and each other. The announcers were both isolated into a second 788T and down mixed to the remaining two channels on the HPX-2000's. "This was a challenging audio environment to undertake, but the Bexel ASG group delivered through technology and their own ingenuity to provide us with everything we needed," lead audio Jamie McCombs stated. McCombs added, "Each of our two mixers had their own personal audio golf cart and the design, layout and functionality allowed for the best working environment under these conditions."

After each round of golf the camera operator would deliver their P2 cards to Bexel's ingest station consisting of a group of four computers where each card was copied simultaneously to two different hard drives. "We needed to be very conscious about where all the media was being stored and made sure we always had two copies of it" commented Bexel's own Jason Denagy. Once this material existed on these computers it was available to the network and the transcoding process could begin immediately. "This application is not ready for an immediate turn around application, but WITH any project where you have 24-48 hours to deliver, this workflow provides many advantages including cost" added Cozort.

Want to talk about it? Contact Joe Wire directly HERE: jwire@bexel.com