Shop Talk is the National Hot Rod Association's live weekly show where remotely-located hosts engage with fans for an hour on Facebook and YouTube with Singular overlays adding a professional polish. Each week they discuss previous races and/or technical topics related to drag racing.

Ever since the COVID crisis, the NHRA team had to shift their entire live production operation to a single apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Part of this significant transition involved implementing custom Singular cloud-based overlays which have allowed for a steep reduction in production costs and elimination of traditional graphics hardware.

Rob Hedrick, Director of Post-Production and Supervising Producer at NHRA says, "Singular is the easiest graphics system I’ve ever used. We’ve been using Singular to deliver the same quality graphics that our fans have come to expect. Until now, this quality was only possible with hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware and recurring software agreements."

As for the technical workflow of Shop Talk, NHRA is using a NewTek Tricaster to switch the show. Using Singular Recast (which converts an overlay output to an NDI feed), they take the overlay NDI feed into Tricaster and "leave the key always hot". Hedrick says, "this allows for an AD or Graphics operator on headset with me to [remotely] run the graphics for the show if needed".

Rob expresses, "The Singular workflow easily adapts to any setup. From streaming applications to a full-sized network telecast, Singular can cost-effectively deliver jaw-dropping graphics."

Rob Hedrick's personal demo reel for Covid era production work can be viewed, here. He can be reached on Twitter or Instagram @ROBTVLA or via email at rob@hedrick.tv.