Orad's PlayMaker repeats the best plays of the U21 European Championship

The final featured four Orad PlayMakers working simultaneously with images from 14 cameras, three of them super slow motion.

At the European Under-21 Championship, organized by FIFA, the PlayMaker sports replay server from Run has played a key role. The production company Mizmor, in charge of the UEFA signal, has used this solution in its major sporting events in the last four years.

Daniel Lankry, CEO of Mizmor Productions, highlighted that "PlayMaker allowed the replay of a wide variety of camera angles during matches. In addition, with PlayMaker file sharing between several servers, we have been able to edit three types of highlight summaries: a 10-minute recap of each half, a summary of goals and best plays, and another summary with highlights such as cards, substitutions..."

In this high-profile production, the group stage matches were covered by 12 cameras, two of them super slow motion working at three times normal speed. With its eight-channel servers and flexible configuration, only three PlayMakers were needed for this production, each operator has two outputs for back-to-back playout of replays with a mix effect.
In the semi-finals and final, an additional PlayMaker was added to cover a total of 14 cameras, three of them super slow motion, with one of the PlayMakers mixing super slow motion and standard cameras simultaneously.

Lankry adds that "the actual production began two hours before the match and consisted of editing highlights of the players' arrival, warm-ups and the pre-match ceremony. The highlights were transmitted to the EBU/EBU satellite for use by other broadcasters."

The intelligent event tagging tool that PlayMaker provides from its touch screen offers operators the possibility of instantly tagging each play or clip with all the relevant metadata, such as the player's name, action... immediately making the images available as required by the filmmaker.

PlayMaker's PlayNet module with Gigabit connection provides the ability to instantly share clips between multiple servers, for highlight or playout-bumper editing from any angle.

Finally, with PlayMaker's Ethernet-based export/import tools, all pre-match images can be easily imported from a standard Windows NLE environment, making them immediately available for playback.