Construction on the nation's largest video board in college football is continuing to make progress right on schedule.
On Friday, July 10, Andy Young, assistant athletics director for video services, addressed the media on the digital aspects of the video board's progress.
"We've spent the last few months developing our look and feel throughout the game, pregame, different looks that we'll go to," Young said. "So we know what it looks like on small monitors, on paper, so once we get the board powered up and fired on in the next few weeks, we'll start testing that out to see if it actually makes sense on a large structure in the stadium."
In technical terms, Young said his team has had to learn how to stretch the image on the large board.
"The board itself is bigger than a 16-by-9 image," Young said. "So we've had to learn a lot of new equipment in terms of the software that powers it to get the full image on the board. There's a lot of different ways we are going to be doing it. We have probably five looks we can go to ... so there's a lot of different things that go into it, and we're prepping ourselves with different looks and what we need to do from a video standpoint to get the image on to that board."
The size of the addition will take twice as many technical workers to operate this season, which includes a large portion of student employees.
Apart from the massive size of the screen, the resounding audio is a key component of what makes the renovations a game-changing experience.
"I think it will be the number one thing, besides the size of the board, that the fans notice," Young said. "The number one complaint people always share with me is, 'What are you going to do about the sound?' So this will address that and make the experience better for the fans to hopefully hear what is being said."
One thing that most fans haven't addressed is the concern that the size of the board will be a distraction to the players.
"It will be different," Young said. "Hopefully through practices, having it on when they're out there, they can get acclimated to it, get used to how it's going to look on game day."
Test runs for the video board will start in early August.
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