Case Study
Coors Field
Section 1
Introduction
The Colorado Rockies are a Major League Baseball (MLB) team based out of Denver, Colorado, and they play their home games at Coors Field, which sits at 1600 meters above sea level and offers sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains.
As the first High Dynamic Range (HDR) sports venue in professional baseball, Coors Field offers a groundbreaking in-venue production experience for Rockies fans, which is highlighted by the gigantic rocky mountain-shaped video board located in left-center field.
Section 2
The Challenge
In 2017, the Rockies were set to celebrate their 25th anniversary, and to mark the occasion they undertook a complete in-venue production technology upgrade to elevate the fan experience at Coors Field.
At the core of this upgrade was a full HDR workflow where all signals coming into the production control room would be upconverted to the 1080p standard.
Section 3
The Solution
To handle the complexity of an HDR workflow, the Rockies turned to Ross Video to design a Unified Video Control System , which featured Ross products at the backbone of the production control room and the LED display control system.
Specifically, through the XPression Tessera graphics designer and controller, the Production Control Room provides HDR content to various displays throughout the venue. In addition, XPression Tessera Nodes are configured in N+1 redundancy, allowing for single-click disaster recovery. Finally, all graphical content fed to the LED displays is rendered pixel accurately in real-time.
“For our project, we decided to go with Ross XPression Studio and Tessera for our Main Display, Character Generator, Fascia Displays, and concourse feeds. Having XPression as a uniform graphics platform allowed us to share data-driven layouts and animations across several outputs while keeping a consistent look,”
Jeff Donehoo
Manager of Rockies Vision
The core components of the Ross Solution include:
- Acuity Production Switcher
- DashBoard for full venue control
- XPression for traditional character generated graphics
- XPression Tessera for LED displays pixel-accurately
- Tria+ Video Presentation Server
- Tally Control Monitoring Systems for signal tracing and monitoring
Section 4
The Impact
By unifying the Production Control Room with a Display Control solution, the Rockies were able to achieve a single workflow for generating and displaying content in HDR. With the addition of custom DashBoard panels, control of the entire venue can be achieved at the push of a button.
Through the power of XPression and an accompanying Datalinq server, the RockiesVision team heightened the fan experience even further by presenting a variety of stats across the various displays in real-time.
In addition to providing the technology to support an HDR workflow, Ross Video’s Creative Services Department, Rocket Surgery, worked closely with the Rockies team to elevate the look of their graphics package.
When speaking about the impact that Rocket Surgery had on their game presentation, Donehoo adds, “They took our designs and ran with it where we need an extra push, and they proposed new ideas that we were not thinking of. They walked us through the XPression and DashBoard build-out and supported us every step of the way. By Opening Day, it felt like they had as much of a vested interest as we did in the success of the show. Overall, this ambitious build helped us enhance the gameday experience at Coors Field, and a large part of that is because of the entire Ross team.”
“XPression allowed us to implement stats from many different sources in minutes. For example, we were given the goahead for our 50/50 Raffle about a week before opening day. Within a matter of minutes after getting the XML data feed from our provider, we had live data outputting to any board that we wanted,”
-Jeff Donehoo
Manager of Rockies Vision
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To discover how Ross Video is creating unforgettable game-day experiences for sports fans while streamlining operations for in-house production teams, explore our Sports Venue Solutions Page.