NULSCC 2025

National Universities Lead and Speed Climbing Championships
(On February 22th, 2025)

Video

We produced two livestreams for the event:

1. Qualifiers (9:30am-4pm ish)
   This was a more informal stream which was a great opportunity for us to build up our setup over the course of the stream. Whilst we started the stream with only 2 working cameras, by the time the Qualifiers had finished we had grown our streaming setup to include 4 operated cameras, a PTZ camera and graphical overlays for the competitors.
2. Finals (4:50-7pm ish)
   This was the main event using our full setup. We had 5 camera operators and 2 dedicated video mixers, one for mixing the cameras and one for controlling the graphics and audio.

Both were streamed to the NULSCC Youtube Channel, with the Finals being shown on the Big Screen

Cameras

@Joel this is your part

Overlays

The overlays were run using H2R Graphics on a dedicated laptop. This laptop sent two inputs to the ATEM (Fill and Key) which were overlaid onto the stream using a Downstream Key. :::info We had some lag issues at the start which was caused by a delay between different USB-C > HDMI adapters. This was fixed by switching them out for different adapters with closer delays :::

We developed the following overlays for the events:

Description	Overlay
Animated NULSCC Logo Used throughout the stream. Files: nulscc-logo
Competitor Lower-Third Displayed the name, number and university of every competitor. Data was filled using a Python script which fetched data from a database hosted by RestDB and used the H2R Graphics HTTP API to send it to the overlay. Files: nulscc-l3
Sponsor Ticker Cycled through all sponsors and supporters. Didn't work - Tried to have all images embedded into the HTML file but H2R graphics couldn't handle it. We had to update logos manually instead. Updated version uses online images Updated Files: nulscc-ticker

Created by Oliver Smith

Other

• Music - We used copyright-free music for both livestreams from NoCopyrightMusic (in particular the "Modern" music) and NCS

Live streams

Qualifiers

Finals

Lighting

Lighting needed to be exciting enough to add value to the competition, whilst making sure nothing was in athletes way or distracting them. Health and safety was a large concern when rigging/planning lights.

Lighting needed to be exciting enough to add value to the competition, whilst making sure nothing was in athletes way or distracting them. Health and safety was a large concern when rigging/planning lights.

Pictures to come

The plan was to use:

1. The Cobs as uplighters, 3 on each side of the path athletes take as they come into the competition area.
2. Battens attached to the edges of the speed walls to indicate the winner in each race.
3. Profiles on the bouldering wall as spotlights for the base of the speed walls, the top of the lead wall and the podium (which was built in the main competition area).
4. A profile as a follow spot as the athletes made their way onto the competition area.
5. The Lumi's as backlighting for the commentator room/area

The nature of live events and working in such unique spaces mean that often things do not go to plan, and in the end adapted to:

Quantity	Item	Usage / Notes
6x	Prolights StudioCobFC	Uplighters with a rainbow chaser, when operating I couldn't see but from the stream it turns out I was only controlling 5!
4x	Equinox RGB Power Batten	Attached to speed walls indicating the winners
1x	SL Profile	Lighting the medal podium after the finals
1x	Rack 6 Dimmer
1x	Zero88 FLX

I should've made better notes about the cables I brought, but lots of long DMX/powercon is needed as the wall is a big room and often cables need to take the very very long way round. As an example a Cob approximately 5m away from the mixing position was separated by over 30 meters of DMX as the cable went completely round the building! Bring powercon couplers if possible as well.

We attempted to add university climbing club colours to the FLX for the battens, however club colours sometimes had no relation to university colours and some universities are more cautious to share their HEX codes. Additionally, our battens are not very good for precise colours. University colours would work on the COB's and LumiPar's however.

FOH Positions

As with all departments, there was uncertainty regarding placement for FOH mixing positions. In the end, the plan was for lighting to mix on the balcony above the climbing centre, right next to the entrance to the Sports and Wellness Hub. Lighting would have been on the cans network and had a stream feed so the main area was visible.

This ended up being to much to do in such a short space of time, so lighting set up on Flo in the same area in the climbing centre as Video and Sound. It was cramped, but it worked!