When CBS Sports broadcasts images of the players taking the field on February 7th for Super Bowl LV to millions of viewers around the world, it will be the culmination of the most challenging season for live football sports production in the U.S.
The requirement for a wide dynamic range to be provided economically is usually met by what is loosely called gamma, which is a non-linear transfer function having numerous drawbacks. However, there is an alternative form of what might loosely be called gamma, which is floating point.
Timing accuracy has been a fundamental component of broadcast infrastructures for as long as we’ve transmitted television pictures and sound. The time invariant nature of frame sampling still requires us to provide timing references with sub microsecond accuracy.
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Allowing one actor to play two roles in the same scene has been possible, at some level, at least since 1961’s The Parent Trap, in which one of Hayley Mills’ arms disappears visibly behind a soft-edged split screen. To put it mildly, techniques have improved, but keeping the necessary technology out of the way of a director whose tastes run to very freeform moviemaking is a challenge in itself.
It’d be easy to think that when Bryce Bayer’s name appeared on the Kodak patent for single-sensor color cameras in 1976, it was a new idea. Sufficiently new to be patentable, perhaps, but actually the idea of covering a sensor with a pattern of primary-colored filters goes back to the earliest days of color photography.
The way consumers engage with content is constantly shifting and at a faster pace than ever before, leaving the television industry playing catch up. Broadcasters, production companies and content producers around the globe are seeing the complexities in production and distribution soaring, increasing costs with lower revenue per asset. At the same time, the TV production world has struggled to keep pace with the twin drivers of technological advancement and evolving consumer viewing behavior.
The industry experienced futureshock head-on in 2020. The impact will take a long time to unwind but it’s already clear that some changes will be profound and not all of them bad. In part 2 we look at what sports and sportscasters need to do to change the live experience to make money and AI’s growing role in the ecosystem.
With Blackmagic recently introducing a new 12K camcorder, the question arises (once again) how much resolution is enough. After all, even the most fervent resolution junkie would have to agree there is a practical upper limit to resolution and how much is actually discernible and worthwhile.
