GAA crowd noise: How augmented atmosphere became a reality on Sky Sports

The absence of fans at Croke Park this weekend will be noticeable

The Sky Sports GAA broadcasting team explain the challenges associated with building augmented GAA crowd noise.

The 2020 Championships brought with them a wide array of logistical obstacles both on and off the field, given the impact of coronavirus.

While the GAA along with county teams had to make arrangements in order for the competitions to be staged safely, there were also hurdles for broadcasters.

Televising games from empty stadia was largely a novel concept and presented its own challenges, given the absence of fans,

"Firstly, we knew that some fans would like [crowd noise], while others would like to hear the teams on the field. The simplest solution, given we have the technical capacity to do it, was to offer the choice," explains Sky Sports' GAA producer Ciaran O'Hara.

"I first saw a football match return and there was no augmented sound. For me it felt like watching a training session.

"It was immediately on the agenda for the Premier League, and for other sports. Where I really became interested was when they brought it onto the Super League. I was able to see directly how it would work for us. Having seen it on Super League, it looked like the correct course of action for us, because they were offering the exactly the same option, where you had the choice.

"I felt it could work in GAA, but people needed to have a choice. Even on a straw poll, some were in favour and some against.

"So the simplest solution of the lot was to make sure the viewer has choice."

The stands will lie empty this weekend at HQ

Building the bank from scratch

The advantage in football was that there was a database of crowd noise already banked for EA Sports. But it needed to be constructed for GAA from the ground up.

That was the task facing assistant producer Ruaidhri O'Connor, who had already been through the process in other sports.

"It went down well with the soccer, and then we tried it on the darts. I clipped up a lot of the crowd noise from the World Championship at the Ally Pally, and the World Matchplay, and the Premier League night in Dublin," he explains.

"We used them on the darts tournaments over the summer, and that seemed to go down well also.

"For the GAA, it was in the pipeline. It was one of the last sports to come back.

"The decision was made to try it on GAA. And then it came to me to try and go back on old matches to clip it up."

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It was time to reapply the process to Gaelic games.

"I went back over the footage of the bigger matches where you would have louder crowds, at games like All-Ireland finals in both codes," he continues.

"Then you're looking at getting a selection of crowd noise for different scenarios; for goals, points, wides, controversial frees, red cards, or general atmosphere as a base level.

"I stripped the commentary off the audio. But to tidy it up even more, I put it through a dubbing studio, where a sound engineer sat down and was able to polish the different atmospheres.

"Once it was finished, I sent it over to Ciaran in the [broadcast] truck for the guys to use on the broadcast."

Sky Sports has been broadcasting from empty stadia

Injecting the buzz on game-day

With the augmented crowd noise at their disposal, it is then down to the broadcast team on matchdays to incorporate it into the live content.

"Technically, the manner in which it works is we have a sound supervisor in Pat Keogh. Pat, aside from dealing with all of the audio sources that we would typically have, also has a bank that Ruaidhri has created. That was a huge challenge in itself," explains O'Hara.

"GAA is higher scoring than a football match would be. So you are going to have a greater variety of scores. Because it is an aerial game, sometimes you have to wait for the umpires to see if it is a score. So that took some adjustment, to judge if it is a score.

"You need to make editorial calls, because there is a risk that you might imply something, in the use of audio. Particularly with the likes of hawk-eye or a controversial refereeing decision, when you are trying to apply balance and fairness to everybody."

Watch Limerick vs Waterford in the All-Ireland final live on Sky Sports Mix from 2:30pm Sunday. Viewers have an option to watch the coverage with or without augmented crowd noise.