Good Morning!
Despite everything on hold, I have actually found a suprising amount of time to be productive the last few days. I have never been so full of ideas in my life, a constant urge to learn and grow my skillset.
Lots of people are bored and I certainly have those moments, there are so many things I would rather be doing, but we must try to channel our thoughts elsewhere.
Let’s make the most of it.
1. Focus on your mental health
2. Look after each other
3. Get Creative!
💪🏽
I’ve a cool topic this week
Anyway, G’away from me… (social distancing and all)
The NFL Yellow Line
Sportvision actually won an Emmy for it.
For those unfamiliar with American football let me catch you up real quick.
When attacking, you essentially have four attempts to make a play and score, or else possession is turned over to the opposition.
In those plays, if you make more than 10 yards of ground towards the end zone, you get reset to the ‘1st down’, and basically have another 4 goes at trying to score.
If you don’t make the 10 yards, your ‘second down’ starts from where you got tackled, and slowly you edge closer to the 10-yard marker as you proceed with your third and fourth plays.
Markers are held up on the sidelines for the players, that indicate how far 10 yards is from where the first down started, and naturally they move every reset.
This imaginary target line, marked from the side of the pitch, is really hard to judge, especially on tv!
That was until in 1998, SportVision & ESPN debuted a revolutionary technology which we now take for granted in all sports…
Image: Global Spec
The Yellow Line.
(A truly remarkable feat … read on…)
“The basic concept is simple: draw a superimposed straight line in the right place on the playing field. However, the development work that made this yellow line possible was complex, both in the conceptual details and its on-site execution.”
“The technology's success required more than just advanced graphic-image algorithms running on powerful graphics processors.”
“Delivering this feature was complicated by the fact that sporting venues change regularly. Perhaps more important — sports broadcasters and game fans are unforgiving of even minor glitches or mistakes.”
(read more - Globe Spec)
The line is not simply drawn and left there, it must constantly change, in the newer versions, the line is ‘drawn’ around 60 times a second.
I won’t go into too much detail here, albeit fascinating, I simply want to outline the problems the technology had to overcome.
Firstly, the cameras are a problem.
The live broadcast will feature different cameras, all with unique lenses and focal lengths, and all from different angles around the stadium.
Every time the tv director cuts between them and every time they pan or zoom, the line must remain perfectly in place.
Secondly, the stadiums and pitches are all not made equal. They are all different sizes, shapes, the tv cameras are set up in new positions. Some pitches themselves are contoured for water drainage etc.
A 3D model of every field is created, and then the position & perspective of the cameras is calculated relative to the field within that 3D space.
In the early days, it cost $25,000+ a game just to have the ‘yellow line’…
“We got lucky the first season because we only did night games (ESPN Sunday Night Football) so the lighting was consistent. Snow and rain caused problems and on one occasion, there was torrential downpour at a Kansas City game.”
“I initially proposed red as the color for the first down line because it showed the least amount of movement. Today, the line is solid as the camera moves around. But in the beginning, we had a lot issues with line movement. I experimented with a number of line colors and red seemed to work the best. In the end, it was Jed Drake, at ESPN, who chose the yellow as the color that is now used in the First-and-Ten line.”
(read more - Sportvision Interview)
Image VOX
Lastly, as technology improved, it enabled the line to seamlessly blend behind the players and any obstructions, as if it was truly on the ground.
This is achieved sort of like a ‘green screen’ where anything that is not the colour of the field is not drawn over - players, jerseys, boots etc.
However, this presented another big challenge, when using a chroma-key, the software looks for one shade of colour to replace, but depending on the grass in each venue, the weather on the day, there might even by artificial grass, they all have different shades of green, even teams that play in green colours…
And then what happens if it rains and the pitches is a muddy brown, or what if it snows?
(For those curious, one of the ways they got around it is by ‘not drawing over’ anything that has moved since the last time that the line was drawn - in last few frames. Therefore despite the lighting & colours, the software can recognise the pitch palette as whatever has not moved or changed.)
This is a great quote from Sportvision.
“It took a whole truck to house all the hardware. We used the same truck that was used for the puck tracking system. We bought it from Fox and reconfigured it for this project.
Early in the project, we told ESPN: "We can't do this game in Philly. It's a Thursday Night game and we can’t physically get the truck out there." And they said, "okay". But when the Yellow Line became a big hit, ESPN really pushed us to do the Philly game. I recall a rumor that ESPN was even considering getting one of those big Russian transport planes to ship the truck to Philly and back.
At that point we thought to ourselves, "we're not charging enough for this stuff if they're actually thinking of doing that."
(read more - Sportvision Interview)
The technology evolved quickly, even within American football, to also include the blue line (line of scrimmage) and many other stats displayed on the field live in the game.
The same concept is used to display ads pitches and so much more.
Sports all over the world found new uses to expand on the concept and improve their spectator appeal.
Take Sailing for example, a sport close to my heart, and one that is impossible to explain to non-sailors and even harder to judge distances and angles…
Image: Wired
Image: Standford
The ‘America’s Cup’ sailing event brought the money needed to properly invest in making sailing an accessible sport for TV, and the technology has since been used widely, from the Olympics & world cup dinghy racing events to the Volvo Ocean Race and other trans-global races.
Back in 2016 VOX produced this video which explains it really well if you’re in a video mood.
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