EMG’s Hamish Greig on Spidercam’s Golf Debut, Expanded Support for NBC Sports

The 153rd Open Championship is underway at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland and topping the list of innovations is a first for any golf tournament: the use of a four-point Spidercam on a golf course, in this case on the 18th green.

“We’re getting incredible shots with it and have the kind of versatility on the 18th hole that we have never had before,” says Hamish Greig, director, golf operations, EMG, part of Gravity Media Group.

The 153rd Open Championship features a golf first: a four-point cablecam (in this case a Spidercam) flying over the 18th green.

The Spidercam PRO System is outfitted with a Sony P43 camera and a Canon CJ12 lens. Dave Whitlock, Project Manager ACS, also part of EMG, says the flight area around the green measures 90x45x17 meters with the towers built into the grandstand by Unusual Rigging.

Greig says there are three aspects to the system that need to be in constant consideration.

“It cannot be in the line of sight of the golfer,” he says, “you must manage the position of the shadows of the Spidercam camera gimbal and cables, and it mustn’t make any noise whatsoever. Those three things make it a tool that requires a lot of talent to set up and operate, but we’ve been getting it right so far and it’s been beautiful.”

(l-to-r) EMG’s Greg Livermore, Alan Jessup, Jackie O’Shea, and Hamish Greig at the 153rd Open Championship at Royal Portrush.

The Spidercam is just one of a large number of specialty cameras that ACS is providing. Whitlock says there are nine bunkercams, a UHD railcam at the sixth hole, two tunnel cams, two bridge cameras, a camera at the starter podium, a lipstick camera on the 1st tee, an arrivals camera, a camera in the recorder’s cabin, and two Smarthead 3 robotic cameras with box lenses on the putting green and driving range (NBC Sports also has four of those systems on the course). In addition, Gravity Media’s Connectivity division is providing 18 RF cameras for the world feed which include seven handhelds, two Steadicams, two Top Tracer cameras, one Cinematic style camera, two UHD RF cameras on 6 and 16th holes, a drone, two XMO ultra slow-motion cameras, and the airplane coverage. Connectivity is also supporting NBC Sports with four cameras, supplying four to Sky UK, and then two for U-NEXT in Japan, and four for the Marquee groups plus two reverse vision course wide monitor.

The UHD HDR cameras are part of another new workflow as the production team for the par three holes is not on site but instead back in Osterley Park.

John Newton, Gravity Media chairman and CEO and Jamie Hindhaugh, Gravity Media, Regional CEO for the UK, at the Open Championship compound.

“We’re doing the par three UHD HDR as a remote surface production with the surfaces and production team back in London remotely controlling the devices which are here in the EMG OB,” says Greig.

The other big change this year is a return to the pre-pandemic days as NBC Sports is doing a full side-by-side production.

“They have a lot more green cameras and that gives them a lot more freedom to tell their own story,” Greig says of approximately 15 additional NBC unilateral cameras.

The core of the compound for the Open Championship, as it has been since 2017, which is a large IBC building comprising production-control rooms, replay areas, and audio rooms (and equipment racks). It is home to both the world-feed production team and the NBC Sports team, working at maximum efficiency (the Sky UK team continues to cut its show remotely from its broadcast facility in Osterley Park, near London). That core IBC building is one just part of a large compound that also houses EMG production units and portable cabins and facilities.

On one side of the compound is the world-feed operation: on the other, the unilaterals. According to Greig, Nova 121 was the first truck to turn up for the host-feed build-up and serves as main communications hub for the ETP and world-feed team (until the main golf trucks 112A and B turn up). On the unilateral side of the compound two trucks: one (Nova 111) for NBC Sports, one for Sky Sports (Nova 53) plus Nova 5 for Live at The Range.

All of the entities are requiring more and more content and, along with the 178 cameras (109 for the World Feed, many of which are also available to Sky and NBC), Hawkeye are providing around 180 channels of Server records which complement the work done on the EVS servers for the main productions.

“The Hawkeye servers are doing super ISOs which allows us to capture every shot for the archive,” says Greig. “But three of those operators are also available as regular replay machines in case the main submix EVS operators missed a shot.”

As always, a golf major requires a lot of cabling with 24 fiber nodes installed by North One and then EMG cable rigging team laying down another 35 kilometers of TAC fibre, 22 kilometers of SMPTE, and 10 kilometers of Multi cable.

And as is the norm the EMG team had to not only get the Open Championship infrastructure into shape but also facilitate last week’s Scottish Open as well as the LPGA’s Amundi Evian Championship from France. On Sunday evening the trucks came off air in 2000 and travelled overnight and by ferry to park up at 0800 on Monday morning in Port Rush.

“We had 22 RF cameras come here from the Scottish Open as well as 40-odd line cameras as well as 15 high-power radio mics, and 24 channels of radio talk back,” says Greig. “And from Evian we needed our spare TED’s (Telecast Elimination Device, the equivalent of SHEDs in the U.S.) as we need about 135 for this event. That’s a lot of sheds, and especially when you consider we’re on air on the Monday here for Sky plus ‘Live at the Range’ and ‘Live From’ for the Golf Channel. So, the first thing we do when the trucks come in from Scotland is get our shortfall of 50 Teds out in the field so we can get the rest of the cameras out there so we can do a FAX check on Tuesday at 3 pm.”

For all involved in an Open Championship the days are long, but Greig says everyone has delivered.

“With the size of this show and all the other shows going on around it, people are tired, but they are the key to the show’s success, and it is part of major OB life” he says. “And up next is the Senior Open next week and return to normal golf schedule continues.”