The highest level of eSports for Peacekeeper Elite – the local title of PUBG Mobile (PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds) – in the Chinese market, the Peacekeeper Elite League saw the 20 professional teams from across the country gather in the city of Chongquing for first weekly final of the 2021 S2 season.
Held in the Chongqing Banan Huaxi Sports Center, looked to counter the need for on-site staff and expansive cable runs required to connect eSports’ many video and audio feeds, with co-organiser VSPN adopting on Audinate’s Dante to broadcast audio over long geographic distances. While the idea of remote production had previously been considered too challenging due to latency issues associated with audio, the production team’s discovery of Dante changed their approach.
Using Dante, the event’s commentators and production staff were able to largely work remotely in Xi’an – 750km distant from the competition taking place in Chonqqing – with minimal audio latency. This set-up enabled impressive cost savings by reducing the number of individuals on-site, minimising traditional A/V cable runs, and simplifying the workflow under an easy-to-manage Dante network.
In Chongqing, the event’s workflow used an SSL System T S300-32 platform with a redundant T25 DSP engine for outside broadcast. An SSL Live L550 audio mixing console was also used with several Dante interface boxes to capture team voice chat. The Dante network located at the competition site in Chongqing was then connected to the studio in Xi’an using a dedicated network line. This allowed real time, remote audio production in the live broadcast with minimal latency. Further, the team was able to add a robust level of features and management capabilities to the production using Dante Domain Manager.
‘To realise the Dante remote production, we needed to solve signal transmission across subnets, network delay, and PTP clock synchronisation,’ says VSPN Technical Manager, WangWei Xie. ‘To solve most of this we added Dante Domain Manager to the system, which allowed us to group and isolate devices across subnets and plan device group attributes.’
Dante Domain Manager is network management software that enables user authentication, role-based security, and audit capabilities for Dante networks – while allowing for smooth expansion of Dante systems over any network infrastructure.
‘In our system, Dante Domain Manager enables PTP V2 functionality for all Dante devices,’ says WangWei Xie. ‘It locks the devices in the two places under their respective GPS clocks through the Assign Zone function and divides the domains of the Dante devices in the system for distributed management. It also allows us to activate the maximum latency of the Dante devices, and opens enough buffer space to deal with the data transmission delay caused by the remote transmission of the dedicated network line.’
The workflow used a Leader LT4610 GPS master clock generator with the Dante systems in Xi’an and Chongqing. This enabled the two locations to receive GPS satellite signals through an antenna and convert the signals into PTP, BB, and other clock synchronisation signals.
‘The result was that the system was stable, and the live event was a complete success,’ WangWei Xie says. ‘We used Dante to realise the two-way real-time transmission of nearly 20 uncompressed audio streams through the dedicated network line. After three days of live broadcast and testing, the entire audio system had no failure. It perfectly achieved our expected results.’
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