Live From the US Open: ESPN's Successfully Serves Up Immersive AR on the Domestic Front, HDR for the World By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Monday, September 9, 2024 - 9:57 am
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The 2024 US Open concluded yesterday afternoon with Italy's Jannik Sinner defeating American Taylor Fritz in the mens final and it also wrapped up a championship that saw ESPN's US Open coverage enhance its on-air graphics look with both Hawkeye virtual graphics as well as more dramatic AR graphics powered by Girraphic who also provided AR graphics for the Australian Open tennis tournament which kicks off the Slam season every January.
(l-to-r) ESPN's Brett Jackson, Isabel Bristol, and Joe Durante outside the ESPN production center at the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center.
While Girraphic has worked with ESPN on other sports and platforms this is the first they have lent their expertise, their skill, their vision of what they can do to the tennis atmosphere, says ESPN Tennis Executive Producer Jamie Reynolds. They're already working with TA in Australia, so we've seen this integration before and now we're taking advantage of that relationship and experience and figuring out how to use it here in New York. And that was a benefit because they've already been embedded with our coverage going back to the Australian Open courtesy of Tennis Australia.
Reynolds says that a big difference between the Tennis Australia philosophy and ESPN's is that Tennis Australia was looking to use AR graphics to shape how they wanted the Australian Open's brand to be looked like for a world-wide audience.
But for us we already have this sort of AR functionality in primetime for football, basketball, and baseball and for tennis we are using it to give a demonstrative, larger brand feel that also gives a little bit of sparkle and primetime appeal, he adds.
Isabel Bristol, Manager Animated Graphics Innovation & Production Design, says the creative development began last spring in house, taking inspiration from the current animation package. ESPN then took the design concepts to Girraphic to bring the package to life.
We were looking for a blend of what complemented our current look and identity and in August, we fine-tuned the creative with a nod to some of the design elements the USTA was using in their marketing campaign, she says.
The AR graphics are tied into images captured with the Spidercam and Joe Durante, ESPN, associate director, product engineering, says that from a movement standpoint the Spidercam is the best do those sorts of graphics.
Spidercam is the most stable camera for it, and it was an easy transition for them as they work with our team to create the moves for it, he says. It's been a success and also one of the most talked about pieces of the production.
Brett Jackson, Managing Producer, ESPN Production, credits Charlie Collin, ESPN, motion graphics design, manager, and the ESPN Creative Department with playing a big part in the effort.
They helped bridge the communication [between Girraphic and Spidercam] and design a new look for the US Open, he adds.
Jackson also points to new Hawkeye graphics as another great addition to the production as they have added a new layer of creativity to animations and graphics.
They have been a part of this for multiple years and is constantly amplifying their technology and giving us new options for coverage with different styles of tracking and different information planning, he says. Now Hawkeye is in a cool, virtual setting with it that takes the graphic look to the next level. We first saw it at Wimbledon and now it's here.
ESPN's other big lift this year was working with the USTA to make HDR a reality for the world feed. The HDR production at the US Open used the same BBC-created LUT (look-up-table) that was used at Wimbledon, allowing the production team to get used to that HDR workflow. The HDR coverage included matches at Arthur Ashe Stadium, Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Grandstand, and then courts 5 and 17 (he outside courts (or ACE courts) were produced in SDR using Simplylive ViBox).
Olsen says one of the challenges was the mix of HDR and SDR sources as while most of the cameras operated in HDR mode there were some POV-style cameras that still had to operate in SDR mode. All graphics and archived material were also in SDR and needed to be converted to HDR.
Some consuderations in the workflow were monitoring it as you can't switch out 500 SDR monitors, he adds. We also had to handle conversion between SDR to HDR and apply the correct LUT to the SDR graphics, so you are maintaining the integrity of the colorimetry of brands and sponsors. The hardest part is handling the archive, post-production, and frame rate conversion involved in the SDR/HDR workflows. We have found a lot of people have compared this like going from SD to HD when there was a lot of learning curves.
Steve Raymond, ESPN, senior technical specialist, adds that it took a lot of work to lay out the ecosystem.
We had to a diagram of all the moving parts and where the conversion was required so we could assign devices to the signals, says Raymond. And we also took a fairly conservative approach to HDR as we've seen some stuff that pops too much.
Olsen says the effort has paid off as the images are much improved over SDR.
Arthur Ashe Stadium is unique in that you have shadows that go from north to south in the morning and then from east to west in the afternoon, he says. It's a double whammy but the HDR images show a huge improvement aside from the colorimetry which also allows you to see how vibrant the subject colors are.
