Marius Fischer, the editor on Sky Sports News Deutschland HD daily sports-focused comedy series, Matze Knop’s Home Office, explains how it’s being put together during lockdown.
With top flight schedules at a standstill, sports broadcasters are working around the clock to produce content that not only fills the gaps, but offers positivity and support during lockdown.
In Germany, comedian Matze Knop is famous for his impersonations of sports personalities and celebrities including Jürgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola and Christiano Ronaldo.
This has led to the development of Matze Knop’s Home Office, a daily show on Sky Sports News Deutschland HD that offers a lighthearted look at how to get through the coronavirus crisis.
The whole show is produced remotely, with star, production and post teams all working from their own homes across Germany.
Marius Fischer said:
“The show is designed like a sports news show. Matze films in his home in front of a green screen, so that we can key in a virtual newsroom background, with a video wall for interviewees, who are actually calling in via Skype.
There are lots of little fun segments, with music, comedy and impressions, so it’s designed to be a topical but fun and entertaining show that can adapt quickly and with a little humour to the day’s news agenda.
Having everyone work from home is the major challenge – Matze is filming in Lippstadt, I’m in Stuttgart, the production team is in Berlin and Sky is based down in Munich, so we really are stretched across the country.
We’re having to share huge files in order to check that everyone is happy with the cut, which can be really difficult when broadband speeds are slow.
Matze and his brother film the show at home – his brother is acting as director and cameraman. The daily show is a live cut shot in 4K on a Leica SL, so they can easily crop in and out with plenty of detail.
This is directly uploaded to the station around an hour and a half before broadcast each evening in full HD.
I receive an MP4 after broadcast so that I can produce social media clips and then I’ll get a full XDCAM HD422 MXF the next day. These are used to produce a ‘Best Of’ which goes out each weekend.
I edit the social clips and the Best Of from my home-based DaVinci Resolve system. I need to produce six or more clips for social channels each day, so speed is really critical when I need to retime, replace and crop.
I rely a lot on the DaVinci Editor Keyboard for getting all this done quickly.
The interview sections work really well for social media, so to get the best result I render these in 16:9 and import them with scene cut detection.
As soon as I am done with my edit, I have a video call with the producer. I position my phone in front of my keyboard, so that he can see the viewer and timeline and we work through the edit together.
It’s quite a simple way of working, and we could probably have a more ‘professional’ solution, but at the moment it’s all about finding what works quickly and just getting down to work.
We’ve definitely all learned a lot during the past few weeks. For anyone working on remote productions like this, I think my tips would be to stay patient and tolerant, because things do take longer and there are some technical challenges like the internet speeds that are simply out of your hands.
Staying positive and working on such a positive show during this crazy time have been really important for me and has definitely helped us all to have a strong focus to translate that positivity through to our viewers tuning in every night.”