Customer Stories

On Game Days, Coors Field comes alive with a continuous stream of multimedia content designed to strengthen fans’ loyalty to the Colorado Rockies’ brand. The Rockies’ media production team, RockiesVision, works year-round to create content for the baseball team’s 81 home games each season. From player highlight reels to pump-up videos and corporate sponsorship spots, they focus on delivering an exciting and entertaining game-day experience fans will remember for years.

Six full-and-part-time digital producers work for RockiesVision. In addition to game day content, they create media for sponsor commercials, ticket sales, corporate partnerships, and community development. RockiesVision also is the key source of content for the Rockies’ social media platforms.

Recently, the Rockies worked with their technology partner, Diversified, to upgrade their media production infrastructure, implementing Avid solutions to take the team into the next decade and beyond. The goal was to create a complete, end-to-end sports production solution supporting large file sizes, increased storage capacity, and media management capabilities. The Rockies chose Avid NEXIS and MediaCentral | UX to provide the resources to develop an immersive fan experience and position the Rockies for growth. “With MediaCentral and Avid NEXIS, we have faster, more flexible access to our library of assets, and quite a bit more storage—so we’re future-proofed,” explains Jeff Donehoo, Supervisor, RockiesVision.

Streamlined workflows enable creativity and fan engagement

With almost unlimited storage and on-demand access, the RockiesVision staff gains the flexibility to be creative in how they engage fans on game days. Every game, every season is unique. Building an on-going connection with fans is key. That’s why on-demand access to historical clips can make all the difference in engaging fans. Utilizing Avid NEXIS, the Rockies are growing their library of clips and migrating all assets onto a single 200-terabyte platform, so they no longer have to retrieve clips from archive.

This year, as part of the team’s 25th Anniversary celebration, the Rockies asked fans to nominate their all-time favorite 25-man roster. The RockiesVision staff thrilled fans with a series of historical clips showcasing each player’s time with the Rockies. “We were able to get historical clips online and show those stories really quickly without having to remember where they were located or spend time searching for them,” states Donehoo.

And, when the team recently re-signed a former Rockies player, the RockiesVision staff was quickly able to create a video montage from clips of his previous years with the team. “Being able to curate our library and rate and find clips really fast helps us quickly find older archive footage and pull it out through highlight reels for fans and players to enjoy.”

With Avid, editors use the tools that support their workflows

The Colorado Rockies have used Avid solutions since 2012, when they switched from Final Cut Pro to Media Composer | Ultimate. “We rely on Avid for our post-production needs,” declares Donehoo. “When we upgraded, we decided to go with a system that would support ingest from Dreamcatchers, our Sony cameras and numerous other inputs. We also wanted to support editing both on Adobe Premiere and Media Composer,” explains Donehoo.

The Rockies have seven Avid Media Composer | Ultimate systems with DNxIV I/O boxes. They upgraded from a 32-terabyte Avid ISIS system to 200-terabytes of Avid NEXIS | E4 shared storage, and from Avid Interplay to MediaCentral. Plus, RockiesVision added MediaCentral | Ingest and MediaCentral | UX Connector for Adobe Premiere Pro CC, enabling Adobe Premiere Pro users to collaborate and mix and match tools to fit the needs of their workflows.

“The combined functionality of Media Composer and Adobe Premiere really makes us flexible; any editor or compositor can jump between After Effects and Media Composer or Premiere, based on their workflow.”

The seamless integration of Avid solutions with After Effects is particularly important to Donehoo because most of what RockiesVision does has a motion graphics component to it. “It’s all about catching our fans’ attention, creating a level of excitement, and bringing energy to the moment. Avid helps us easily curate our library of clips for the entire season and build season upon season; we can log everything within MediaCentral, so we can find things quickly.”

Focusing on the future

At the end of the 2018 baseball season, the Rockies are upgrading to MediaCentral | Cloud UX, gaining the flexibility to search, browse, access, edit, collaborate, and publish content from any workstation, laptop, or mobile device. “The ability to search through our library without having to be at a Media Composer or MediaCentral station, makes us more flexible,” explains Donehoo. “We can get more done in a shorter amount of time because we spend less time tracking down files and more time focusing on creative tasks.”

“MediaCentral | Cloud UX will add phonetic search capabilities across the board,” explains Donehoo. “That’s a big feature for us.” Using the MediaCentral | Cloud UX phonetic search capabilities, the RockiesVision team will be able to locate every clip that contains a specific spoken word or phrase—across all available storage and archives. “Our MediaCentral engine will do the hard lifting. That’s the part that I love the most; if I need a specific angle and a diving catch, I will be able to search diving. And, it will take 30 seconds to find four options, as opposed to an hour.”

“As an editor, I can’t see working in an environment without a tool like MediaCentral. We implemented Avid solutions, so we could spend less time trying to manufacture a workflow, and more time actually trying to create,” concludes Donehoo. “The minute the season ends, we’re starting to prepare for opening day next season. We have so many projects that anything that saves time is very valuable.”