At SVG's SportsTechLA event, hosted by UCLA, attendees will be treated to a first look at ESPN's new multimillion-dollar production facility. Built across the street from the Staples Center, the plant was built to support 3-GB and 1080p/60 production and goes live in April. On Jan. 20, three executives as the heart of the design and management team will be on hand to discuss what the new facility will mean for the nation's top sports network.

"We have a lot of smart engineering and production folks that have been working on this for four years," explains Judi Cordray, general manager of the ESPN Los Angeles Production Center. "All the technical geniuses back in Bristol [CT] have been putting this production center together and building the technology that we're using in it."

Those technical geniuses include Jon Pannaman, senior director, technology, for the ESPN Los Angeles Production Center, and Gary Reynolds, senior director, production operations for the facility, who will join Cordray on the panel at SportsTechLA.

"The system we're looking at is a combination of different technologies," Pannaman explains. "When all is in place, any editor in Bristol or L.A. can obviously see their own media but also what's on the other site. That's done on browse-quality video, but they'll be able to make a shot selection and drop it on their timeline."

When the setup is complete, Pannaman explains, it will not matter whether the game was recorded for ingest in Bristol or Los Angeles. Once an editor has built a timeline, the full-quality media will be sent at high bitrate to be incorporated into the finished piece.

"It really is quite a seamless setup," Pannaman says. "[The editors] really don't need to know where their source material is coming from."

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