The NBA’s solution to the coronavirus pandemic was not a simple one, but you can’t argue with the results. The league has been playing games inside a cordoned off section of the Walt Disney World Resort in central Florida since July. There have been no positive COVID tests inside the NBA bubble. There has been some excellent basketball, starting with the “seeding games” contested by the 22 teams invited to the bubble and continuing into the conference finals, as only the Boston Celtics, Miami Heat, Denver Nuggets, and Los Angeles Lakers remain.
Potential disease vectors that we are, fans have not been allowed inside the bubble, though we can follow the action on TNT, ESPN, and ABC. It’s not every season that the league’s television partners have to produce high-level live coverage during a pandemic and from a theme park, but they’ve made it work. To find out how, I called Chris Brown, the vice president of sports production and technical operations at Turner Sports. Brown spent about three weeks inside the bubble helping TNT’s crews get set up and has been overseeing their productions throughout the NBA’s restart. In our conversation, we talked about fancy new cameras, rampant on-court swearing, and why we don’t see the players’ families on TV. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nick Greene: You’re gearing up for the Western Conference Finals now. What has changed, production-wise, in the bubble since Day 1?
Chris Brown: The biggest thing is there is less of it. We started out with eight production trucks down there, and we’re down to the final three. There’s sort of a sense of relief as we’ve made it through each segment. From a production and content standpoint, we’ve made some adjustments in terms of adding a couple more of our super-slo-motion cameras, Hypermotion cameras, things like that.
Does not having fans make it easier to add these new cameras?
It’s allowed us the freedom and the flexibility to put cameras in places that traditionally we cannot. Our corner cameras—we call them “slash cameras”—we’ve been allowed to bring them closer to the court. We’ve been able to experiment with our rail-cam, and it’s been well received. That’s the camera that runs along the nearside sideline. We’ve gotten quite a bit of action from that.
We’ve also been able to go back to putting a handheld on the camera side at center court. These are things that, in our traditional coverage, we have not been able to do, either because of fans or because of safety.
Can you give a quick explanation of how the artificial crowd noise works?
Capturing crowd sound is something that we had been doing on our own. We’ve been able to take a mix of that and, with the help of the NBA and some of their vendors, we take that collective knowledge and the collective library of crowd noises and what we call “swells” and leverage them into a tool that the NBA is using courtside. As the game ebbs and flows, they’re helping to manage some of the acoustic specifics that you tend to hear when you’re at a game. They’re doing that in real time. As the game goes on, there’s someone who is basically being the active crowd participant.
So it’s someone sitting there with like a DJ setup, pressing buttons to get reactions.
Very similar. [They’re sitting] in front of an audio console as well. It’s a combination of things. There are a number of audio feeds going between this particular group and our production facilities so that we can integrate it into the broadcast mix.
To me, it’s seemed as if the crowd noise has improved over time. I guess I…
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