Dude Perfect’s DPHQ3 Soundstage/Enjoyable House Is a Gen Z Model of a Production Facility

Online sports activities phenomenon’s new studio suggests sports activities media’s potential future

Dude Perfect is a quintet of buddies — Cody Jones, Tyler Toney, Garrett Hilbert, and brothers Coby Cotton and Cory Cotton — who got here collectively 15 years in the past and efficiently turned their love of sports activities and hanging out right into a nine-figure enterprise. Since launching their standard YouTube channel whereas nonetheless roommates at Texas A&M University, the principal gamers have posted a whole lot of athletic trick shots which have netted them greater than 60 million YouTube subscribers and a staggering 17 billion-plus views. They’re now valued at $100 million, based mostly on the stake that private-equity agency Highmount Capital invested earlier this yr.

DPHQ3 — Dude Perfect Headquarters, the third and vastly extra expansive iteration of their clubhouse, which opened this yr within the Dallas space — encompasses a full-size basketball court docket, a 45-yard soccer gridiron (full with NFL-regulation objective), a mini golf course impressed by a number of the sport’s most well-known holes, and different taking part in fields that function levels for his or her zany video shoots.

Is Dude Perfect the template for the way forward for sports-media manufacturing? At the very least, it does seem to be a Gen Z model of NFL Films: an enormous postproduction facility that may generate, edit, and transfer media content material round seamlessly and put it out by numerous channels.

But, whereas the NFL Films studio advanced in Mt. Laurel, NJ, is a 200,000-sq.-ft. facility laden with the most recent in broadcast and postproduction audio and video know-how, Dude Perfect’s 80,000-sq.-ft. soundstage/enjoyable home in Frisco, TX, displays its era’s period of sparser however no much less refined media infrastructure, one which depends on IP as an alternative of SDI. It’s TikTok on digital steroids, what Darryl F. Zanuck may need constructed if he had had an iPhone.

Stadium Sound

DPHQ3 additionally has some somewhat severe sound, from parts you’d discover in arenas somewhat than on dorm-room bookshelves. Clear ProAV Systems, the Dallas-area system integrator chargeable for refined broadcast installations for regional companies and homes of worship, outfitted the house with what Clear ProAV AV engineer Chad Fuller calls “stadium-worthy” sound. A complete of 18 L-Acoustics X12 and eight X8 enclosures plus six SB21i and SB15i subwoofers are divided into teams that cowl the soccer, basketball, golf, pickleball, and rock-climbing areas of the primary house. These are zoned to permit particular person playlists for every use.

“We gave them the option to be able to play different material in different areas, with six or eight unique audio sources simultaneously,” he says. “Or they can use it as one giant system and blow it out of the water, audio-wise and decibel-level–wise, if they want.”

Loudspeakers are deployed all through DPHQ3, together with exercise and weight rooms, and within the Dudes’ personal workplaces, every housing a pair of 5XT audio system and a ceiling-mounted SB10i subwoofer — all linked by way of the AVoIP infrastructure threading all the facility. In the chief lounge, a pair of colinear Soka audio system discreetly flank a big video show; in one other house simply throughout the corridor, a dozen ultra-compact X4i and two low-profile SB10i subs are suspended from a grid above a typical assembly space. Eight channels of Shure wi-fi audio are accessible by way of each bodypacks and handheld microphones in a number of RF zones.

“We have implemented an AVoIP infrastructure at DPHQ3 with dozens of audio zones and hundreds of channels of Dante-based audio,” explains Clear ProAV founder Eric Schell. “In their previous building, they used to cram multiple people inside one of their edit bays to watch an initial edit, but, with AVoIP, they’re able to pull everyone into one centralized location — the owner’s lounge, for example — and the team can be on a comfortable couch with a big 4K LED display. Having reliable infrastructure and the highest-quality audio experience is critical for their team and their business operations.”

One of the primary productions there may be Almost Athletes With Dude Perfect, a weekly original series that launched Sept. 10. Hosted by founding member Garrett Hilbert and crew member Kevin “Sparky” Sparkman, alongside a rotating solid of The Dudes, the video podcast sequence marks Dude Perfect’s first transfer into long-form, personality-driven media.

It’s a Post House

DPHQ3 is a manufacturing facility, of types. Fuller makes use of the time period cautiously, nodding in settlement when it’s identified that nobody makes these trick pictures on the primary strive.

“I mean, they don’t really livestream out of there much,” says Fuller. “Obviously, they certainly could, and they’re certainly set up to do that should they want to, but they’re mainly a postproduction house. A lot of what they do is create content, and then it goes to post, which they do there in the office, and then they release it. They have done some livestreaming, but they don’t necessarily have a traditional broadcast-video setup in there with a video switcher and SDI infrastructure. They don’t have that sort of a workflow.”

What they do have is clutch of handheld DLSR cameras and a “very nice” assortment of high-end lenses, says Fuller. What in addition they have is a Facilis HUB shared-storage server that acts because the central repository for what is likely to be tens of millions of hours of video of these trick pictures and different long-form content material, linked to Adobe’s Premier Pro Final Cut enhancing software program.

“It does a lot of meta tagging,” he factors out. “They’ve got a very robust network in that regard. We’ve done 10-GB, 25-GB, 40-GB, even 100-GB fiber connections to their various edit bays that their team does ingest live and pull from. But none of that, again, is ever true broadcast video.”

Frictionless Workflow

Fuller wonders if it’s the remainder of the media business that has to catch as much as the Dudes: “Our industry is moving more and more toward over-IP–based protocols: ST 2110, for example. A lot of that world, even in broadcast, is going to IP, and Dude Perfect certainly has a very robust network infrastructure for which they’re utilizing all 10-GB–based lossless encoders and decoders around their campus.”

Schell notes the frictionless means content material is moved across the large facility, making it really feel extra like informal Gen Z second nature than first-world high-tech.

“There are encoders and decoders all over the place,” he explains. “The editors can edit a video in their editing suite, and the guys just about anywhere in the facility can hit a touchscreen and pull up an editor’s computer and see what they’re working on. Then they can stream that all over the campus. They have the ability to be in the main viewing room and see what Tim is working on up in his suite or see what Sean is working on in his suite, at the push of a button.

“That’s all based on the video-over-IP infrastructure that we designed and put in there,” he continues. “They don’t have to wait and push a potential edit through the rendering process as you traditionally would if you’re going to render out a 12-minute video for the guys to look at. They can do that in real time. That’s the big advantage for them.”

The Future …?

DPHQ3 is probably the quintessential manufacturing studio for Gen Z–period media, however, as iPhones hold including video lenses and as two-minute TikTok movies turn out to be whole on-line narrative sequence, Dude Perfect’s method to sports activities media could turn out to be a mannequin for an additional era.

“It can take them into a more sophisticated production in the future; it definitely has that ability,” says Fuller, noting how the Dudes have interacted with Amazon Prime’s NFL Thursday Night Football present from their workplaces. “It’s extremely scalable, which was one of the goals for the entire project: to design and integrate a scalable infrastructure for them that gives them the foundation to do what they want to do in there.”