Transition from SD to HD was a Slam Dunk with a Future-Proof Blackmagic Design DeckLink Card at the Heart of The YES Network’s Graphics Production Facility

By John McKenna, Chief Engineer, The YES Network

The YES Network is the number one regional sports network in the country, operating 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week. Featuring the 26-time World Champion New York Yankees Major League Baseball team, the YES Network is available to viewers in New York, Connecticut, and parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It also covers collegiate football and basketball and is the official outlet for the New Jersey Nets basketball team. Their schedule includes original biography, interviews, and magazine programs.

I joined the YES Network about six months prior to its launch on March 19, 2002 and was responsible for setting up the broadcast and graphics production facilities in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. This past June, the New York facility was consolidated with the Stamford facility where we now have three G5 Mac computer systems along with Ciprico Huge raid drives of about 1.1 Terrabyte in size. Typically, we have three people involved in doing graphics work, one full-time graphic artist and a number of part time people who come in as we need them.

Our graphic artists use Final Cut Pro, After Effects and Photoshop. Stats, lower thirds and game scores are done at the games on a Chyron Duet in an on-site production truck. These systems are used to produce a lot of the graphics for the games: graphics for our HD studio shows – the pre and post game shows -- This Week in Football and Hot Stove among others -- all of the promo materials for the promotions department, and some promo materials for in-house use for sponsor content. We mix our content from a whole lot of different sources but the heavy artwork for the promotions department and background material are done on the Macs.

Although we were originally an SD facility, earlier on we planned for future growth and expansion and were completely digital, with the exception of analog feeds to the monitors. In the beginning, we did all of our recording on DigiBeta VTRs and edited on Avid Symphony SD editors. As we moved into HD, in order to maintain the highest quality, we installed SRW-5000 HDCAM-SR recorders and moved to Avid Symphony Nitris editing systems. YES also installed an Avid Unity server with 2.6 Tb of SD storage in 2002.

When we started the transition to HD editing, we added an Avid Unity ISIS server with 16 Tb storage which gives us about 100 Hours of mirrored capacity at 145 Mb. In 2003, we started converting some graphics to High Definition using Chyron’s Duet HD. Because we couldn’t find a great HD monitor that was affordable for all the graphics rooms, we bought two Blackmagic Design HDLink high def monitoring converters. The HDLinks enabled us to take the HD graphics video out from the computer monitors to two 23” Apple Cinema Displays where we could see a perfect image of the graphics; we were very happy with the results. Prior to that, the graphics artists were having a problem with visualizing the 16:9 to 4:3 conversion so by using the HDLink and the Cinema Displays, we could see what the graphics would actually look like on a 16:9 monitor.

Initially, we had a couple of G4 Macs and then bought G5 Macs in 2003. We decided we had to do something as far as a good graphics card so, because we had such good success with the HDLink, we selected the Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Pro video capture card and installed them in our three G5 computers. The DeckLink HD Pro cards can instantly switch between SD and HD video equipment so they provided us with a great flexibility and versatility. Now we could use the computers to do the graphics work we wanted to do. The DeckLink HD Pro was able to take in the SD graphics, take in data from the video tape, build graphics elements, render, and stay in the SD mode, keeping us away from analog.

As we moved to HD in 2004, we needed to build HD content for those first HD shows -- Yankee home games. We built the graphics elements in HD but since most of the network was still in SD, we rendered in SD as well as HD. Soon, we were doing all of the Yankees’ home games in HD and even more elements in HD. The graphic artists were able to use the same DL HD Pro cards they were already very familiar with so it was no big trick to transition to HD. The MAC G5s with the Blackmagic cards have made the transition to HD quite easy since the artists were familiar with them and had no problems going back and forth working on HD and SD projects.

In 2006, we did almost all of the Yankees games an NJ Nets games in HD, except for games on the West Coast and most graphics were done in HD. Because we were still primarily an SD network, we continued to make SD and HD copies of the games.

In April 2007, we built an HD production studio suite and went completely HD. By using the same DeckLink HD Pro video capture cards we started with a couple of years back, our artists are using the same hardware and software which enabled us to transition the graphics from SD to all HD to do the graphics for our HD studio shows.

The HDLink started us with Blackmagic Design and the DeckLink HD Pro video capture card became the heart of the whole system. Our graphics production team’s transition from SD to HD was easy because we didn’t have to do any re-training or incur additional costs because our editing system grew as The YES Network grew to become a leader in sports broadcasting.

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