Six Nations 2024: Complex graphics workflow simplifies story of the game By Fergal Ringrose Monday, March 11, 2024 - 16:54
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Sage-sponsored stats for Scotland vs England on Saturday 24 February help to tell the story of the first 70 minutes
With France thumping Wales, Italy stunning Scotland and England edging past Ireland thanks to a last-minute drop goal, the penultimate weekend of the Guinness Men's Six Nations Championship was the usual blend of action and drama setting the stage for an exciting round of final matches on Saturday (16 March).
Graphic solutions provider AE Live has worked with Six Nations Rugby for many years and is currently in a contract that runs until 2025. AE Live produces the world feed graphics for the Men's, Women's and Under-20s Six Nations as well as the Autumn Nations and Summer Series. Along with the world feed the company provides any unbranded feeds as required (if, for example, the word Guinness' needs to be removed from the graphics output for certain territories).
AE Live also delivers multi-language graphics - in French, Italian and Welsh - at the same time as the world feed. And the graphics company also works with most of the broadcasters on their unilateral presentation of the competition, including BBC Sport, France TV, ITV Sport and S4C.
In terms of how the Six Nations graphics palette has grown, latest additions are the on-screen and in-venue shot clock, the bunker TMO foul play review process, and data from Sportable's Smart Ball which is integrated into the match graphics by AE Live and out to air.
At AE Live we use Vizrt as our foundation renderer, and we write all of our own software, project manager James Smith told SVG Europe. All the applications we use across Six Nations are written in-house, and we've used those for many years across lots of different broadcasters.
Wales team line-up for opening Six Nations match against Scotland on Saturday 3 February
Those pieces of software provide a link between our tech department and our partners: Stats Perform, Sportable and Swiss Timing. This allows us to provide graphics at a rate that we can't do in any other sport. It's as good as it can possibly be on rugby, with about five or six pieces of software running at any time.
AE Drive is our rugby output software that actually generates the graphics. We have our AE Catch data handling system - you can see where we're going here with Catch and Drive - where the data comes in and we catch' it. Then there's AE Kick, which controls the clocks which have now become an enormous part of the game.
AE Snap, our CIS [Commentator Information System], is the tool that does an awful lot of work in pulling together the timing, scoring, Stats Perform and the Sportable Smart Ball data into one usable screen that is shared around the OB and is visible to everyone in production, commentary and graphics, said Smith.
And finally the one without the catchy title is our MQTT software, which stands for Message Queueing Telemetry Transport. We've only written that in the last two years or so, since we've been working more closely with Sportable. It allows us to lay out Sportable captions without having to touch them at all. The data comes straight from Sportable into our software; we are hands-off, and it animates on-screen.
They provide two feeds on-site that we're interested in: the first one that I talked about is the MQTT, our software that is pulling down what we would call Snap Stats. When the ball is kicked into touch, a little Sage-sponsored drop-down appears that says '52 metres'. Distance to try-line, territory gain and longest pass are the other common ones you would see on-screen.
That on-site data is transmitted via fibre and as soon as the ball lands it sends a trigger to our MQTT software that picks it up and animates it on-screen. Now we don't put everything on screen so we have to ignore an awful lot of information. If it's not adding editorial value it is dismissed by our software.
The second feed they send is a regular API and we pick it up in the way we do for a Stats Perform file. We pull that down with our AE Catch software and it is more editorially led, so comparing one player's number of passes with another for example - information that is collected over the course of the game. That allows the producers to pull out stories as the game unfolds.
Six Nations is blessed with having a number of people across this, which is great. On-site there is a [Six Nations] world feed producer, a broadcast producer and a world feed graphics producer, as well as our graphics team. They are there specifically to look at these data sets and drive them into production. It is really helpful to have these people on-site, away from our ops who are doing the actual graphics, producing the show and picking up stories that we want to push.
Another example this year is that France T l visions have employed former France number eight Thomas Lievremont to sit with our graphics operator in the truck and push that data out. And it's hard to ignore a six-foot five former professional rugby player in the truck, providing an extra incentive to put a graphic to air!
Kicking shot clock set-up with Swiss Timing
With the bunker TMO and other innovations coming into rugby, it's more imperative than ever that the entire production team is fully briefed going into each match each weekend on what is happening on the pitch, as rugby continues to become a more complex game and thus potentially a more confusing spectacle to watch. And, needless to say, the palette of on-screen TV graphics now plays a key role in making the unfolding match understandable to viewers at home, and in pubs and clubs.
Yes very much so, and I think Six Nations are really good at
