Wed. Feb 5th, 2025

Behind the Scenes at the Northwest Pinball Championships!

The Open Area

Some of you have asked me how technically I do this. Well, let me take you behind the scenes of our setup!

I had 8 Open Division machines equipped with Sony CX 405 cameras to capture player, score, and playfields. They were directly wired them into three 16-channel HDMI switches.

To power these cameras, I used special power strips with USB adapters and extended the USB connections as needed.

For coverage in the Women’s/ Classics room (which is approximately 500 ft away and in a completely different part of the bowling alley), we set up a temporary network cable connection between the two rooms. I configured a laptop to act as an NDI access point, and from there, we established a basic wireless rig, a setup you’ve probably seen at many tournaments before.

This laptop had three capture devices, which captured the video from the portable rig in the room. Then it was sent via NDI feed back to our main broadcast area where we could integrate it seamlessly.

During the finals, we relocated the wireless setup to the Open area to ensure we covered those two machines on the side.

On the computer side of things, I had to handle a lot of tasks such as creating custom graphics, configuring OBS settings, programming the stream deck, writing C# scripts, managing desktop capture, transitions, audio, and all the usual components that come with a broadcast setup.

Additionally, we implemented direct score capture on machines that supported it using two DMD extenders, two Stern Alibaba Specials, and one DVI/HDMI splitter. This helped obviously cut down on the number of cameras I had to use and gave the payoff of really pretty direct capture.

Foo Fighters was my favorite. It looks so good directly captured!

If you have any specific questions or if there’s anything else you’d like to know about this setup, please don’t hesitate to ask!

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