Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UNDER THE DOME South Bend native Tim Collins has been managing Notre Dame's film study for the last quarter century. Collins started shooting games and practices for the Irish football team 24 years ago. Along with recording practices and games, the former College Sports Video Association board member and his team also manage Notre Dame's new iPad playbook system from their office in the Guglielmino Athletics Complex. Blue & Gold Illustrated: How has your job changed in the past few years? Collins: "Everything is about making it faster. Ten years ago we were shooting on tape. That evolved to standard definition we were shooting on SAT- packs, which were bigger packs. Now we're shoot- ing high definition on little SD cards. "It's always evolving and developing. Some peo- ple say it must make your job easier. It doesn't — there are just a lot more things going on. Go back to beta tapes and someone would get a beta tape stuck. Now somebody's iPad doesn't work. Anything with a button, somebody is going to come and ask us to fix it." Blue & Gold Illustrated: How fast can you get practice and game film to the team at this point? Collins: "In [the football facility] probably within 10 minutes of practice ending everything is done for them. When I first started doing this it would take hours. It could be a couple hours before you get everything done. You'd have stacks of tapes, and we had to copy tapes in real time. … Now, they'll take off their shoulder pads and walk right up here to watch." Blue & Gold Illustrated: You switched the play- books from paper to 100 percent on the iPad during the past year. What are some of the advantages to the new system? Collins: "For one you don't have to carry around a big playbook. If it gets lost, and it's a play- book, you can make a copy. If it's on an iPad we can delete it immediately. It's more secure. "If they have five to 10 minutes of free time they can pull it up and watch video. [Quarterback] Malik [Zaire] has his iPad in his hand all the time. Everett [Golson] is the same way. We took them back when school ended, and both of them said no. They both wanted to keep them." Blue & Gold Illustrated: What is the camera setup on the practice field? Collins: "We have four cameras outside, two of those are for end zone cameras. We have fiber- optic cameras in the end zones that are routed right in [to Collins office] and operated by remote control. Then we still have the two sideline guys [on towers manually filming]." Blue & Gold Illustrated: Some schools are experi- menting with drones to film different angles at prac- tice. Is that something you're researching as well? Collins: "We're going to have somebody come out in a week or two and give us a little demo on that. It's a possibility. "It almost gives you that playbook type of look. It will be kind of interesting to see what it does. It will record for 20 minutes at a time. It'll be interesting to see how to change that out. They range from $1,500 to a few thousand for each one." — Dan Murphy Five Questions With … NOTRE DAME VIDEO COORDINATOR TIM COLLINS I n a d d i t i o n t o r e c o r d - ing practices and games, Collins also manages Notre Dame's new iPad playbook system. PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME MEDIA RELATIONS