Recordable Media

Sony DigitalMaster Tape Stars for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets

PARK RIDGE, N.J., Sept. 1, 2005 - Every time the Georgia Tech University football team hits the field, a vital part of their equipment is DigitalMaster™, Sony's highest-grade professional 6mm videotape. The team uses the tape to record every game and every practice.

According to Todd McCarthy, director of athletic video services at Georgia Tech, the reason is simple: "In football, you can't tell a coach, 'the camera had a slack error on practice play number 37.' That doesn't go over well.

"We had been getting about 15 slack errors a year," McCarthy added. "That's 15 plays we missed at some point that the head coach wasn't happy about. We've also had more tape jams than I would have liked. Since we switched to DigitalMaster tape last season, we haven't had a single tape jam or slack error."

McCarthy defines slack errors as faults in the continuity of head-to-tape contact in the record mode. To protect the tape from potential damage, the camcorder automatically stops recording, but as a result, important events may be missed. Before switching to DigitalMaster, McCarthy saw "pixelized" or degraded images during playback on his studio VTRs, which he characterized as slack errors.

DigitalMaster tape avoids this occurrence through the use of advanced formulation. Where previous Metal Evaporated videocassettes employ a single layer of metal, DigitalMaster tape uses a dual layer. The second layer improves carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N) by 2 dB, a substantial increase in recorded signal strength. This helps reduce data errors by 90 percent and dropouts by 60 percent, compared to consumer DV tapes. The tape also features tighter dimensional tolerances, greater resistance to shrinkage and 30 percent more Diamond Like Carbon (DLC) protective coating than consumer DV tape.

Georgia Tech's football program offers a rigorous challenge for its athletes, but the Sony DigitalMedia tape has been able to keep up and withstand the sweltering Georgia weather.

"We'll start camp in August," said McCarthy, a veteran of television broadcasting and sports video positions at the University of Richmond and the University of Pittsburgh. "We'll go in 100-degree weather, 90 percent humidity. By the second month of camp, half the grass on the field is gone. So there's a lot of dirt being kicked up.

"We have four cameras running and a practice will go approximately 25 periods (about five minutes each)," he added. "About every five to seven periods, we pop tapes out and put in new ones. For each camera, we have seven tapes that we keep re-using. Last year, we used those tapes four days a week, four months straight without any problems. It made a world of difference in my comfort level as they went out to practice."

The team re-uses its stock of DigitalMaster tape for practices sessions throughout the season, but each game is recorded to new tape. Georgia Tech also uses the tape format to exchange game video with other teams.

"We exchange tapes with every team we play," McCarthy said. "If we're in the ninth game of the season, we exchange the eight previous games. I wish everyone in our conference would use DigitalMaster tape. It's well worth the extra money for the comfort of knowing that every time I send my students out with a camera, they're going to come back with what I need. As video coordinators, we have a lot of headaches throughout the week. It's always nice to get rid of one."

The Georgia Tech video department, which took home first-place honors in the 2004-2005 Collegiate Sports Video Association "SAVVY" Award competition, also oversees stadium video signboards and video services for 17 intercollegiate sports at the school. This task involves a large fleet of Sony DSR-570WS DVCAM camcorders and DCR-VX2000 DV camcorders along with several VTRs including Sony DSR-2000 and DSR-25 decks, in addition to PVW-2650 Betacam SP® machines for reviewing game tapes sent from teams that still use the half-inch format.

The football tapes are loaded into a nonlinear editing system, where they're "broken down" for each coach. Video is stored on a central server and distributed to 24 networked PCs that act as viewing stations.

"When I got here eight years ago, none of this was digital," McCarthy said. "Mostly everything was done manually by just hooking up a couple of PVW-2650's together with a switcher. We were recording onto a BVW-50 and we had a stack of VTRs that we used to make copies. Now everything is computerized. It's amazing the leaps and bounds this industry has made in the past five years."