PGA TOUR Brings Back Live Drone Tracer Tech for FedExCup Playoffs and Presidents Cup AR graphics from the live moving drone are also planned By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Monday, August 19, 2024 - 10:41 am
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After a successful debut at the Travelers Championship on CBS in late June, the PGA TOUR's live drone tracer technology will continue to be implemented for all three FedEx Cup playoff events, which began last weekend on NBC Sports with the St. Jude Championship in Memphis.
We had a great [tournament] and are looking forward to the next two weeks and the Presidents Cup, says Jon Freedman, SVP, media broadcasting, PGA TOUR. We are off to a tremendous start with NBC Sports, and the bells and whistles will continue to get better and better as we go through the FedExCup Playoffs.
At this weekend's BMW Championship, the TOUR and NBC Sports will also launch augmented-reality graphics from the live moving drone, supported by partners Bolt6, a cloud-based technology provider, and Virtual Eye, the sports division of New Zealand-based Animation Research Ltd.
That same technology and broadcast enhancement will again be provided at the TOUR Championship and Presidents Cup in late August and late September, respectively. KAZE Aerial Production is providing the drone for these productions.
The drone has been a staple of golf coverage in recent years, providing unique angles and cinematic perspectives of these iconic courses, says Alex Turnbull, VP, production technology and analytics, PGA TOUR Media. It's important to note that, while the first implementation at the Travelers Championship was tracing from a moving drone, the bigger win here is that we successfully tracked a 3D object over a live moving camera.
Supported by Bolt6, PGA TOUR deployed live drone tracer technology for last week's FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Even with specialty cameras like a FlyCam, Robocam, or Jitacam, data and analytics are integral to the PGA TOUR's broadcast, and combining those elements with a golf-ball trace from a live moving drone is a difficult task. Still, it's a job that TOUR partner Bolt6 could handle.
PGA TOUR and Bolt6 first mocked up a trace from a moving drone over a year ago, Turnbull notes. Thanks to the partnership and the latter company's understanding of the ShotLink 2.0 system, the effort could leverage the current infrastructure, which provided mapping and trajectory data.
The initial test at the Arnold Palmer Invitational provided Bolt6 with enough sample drone footage that could then be synced up with practice-round Trackman data - such as swing and ball-flight information - on three holes. A second test, at The Memorial, demonstrated live tracking from a moving drone.
As with any debut, says Turnbull, we immediately look for ways to improve and continue to focus on how these AR visualizations will bring more context to the fans. We are most proud of the aligned collaboration between our broadcast and technology partners and the continued pursuit to bring fans closer to the game through the use of technology and statistics.
During the first live deployment at Travelers, there was a slight undercurrent of nervousness, but CBS and others were supportive and excited to debut the technology, says Bolt6 Chief Commercial Officer James Japhet.
[CBS] very quickly removed the training wheels, he says, and the drone was moving quicker than we'd seen in our testing. He adds that CBS Sports Lead Golf Producer Sellers Shy and Director Steve Milton found their groove after experimenting with how best to incorporate the drone tracer footage into the broadcast. Sometimes the drone can move at nearly 50 mph.
Meanwhile, says PGA TOUR's Freedman, CBS pushed us to put the pedal to the metal with the drone tracer and the technology didn't break. The real payoff visual is after the ball lands.
Here's how the system works, according to Japhet. Bolt6 ingests the drone camera at the production truck and encodes it to HEVC before sending it to the cloud via Amazon Web Services. Each frame of the video is processed, and visually identifiable items are matched with those on the course, allowing Bolt6 to fine-tune the position and orientation of the drone's camera in the 3D space. Processing time is around 60 ms.
The live drone tracer technologies integrates mapping and trajectory data from PGA TOUR's ShotLink system.
Afterwards, ball data is pulled from the ShotLink system for the shot being displayed. There's a quick conversion of the coordinate system to ensure that everything is aligned before the data is rendered into Bolt6's cloud engines and streamed to the production truck for broadcast. End-to-end time is around 250 ms, per Japhet, although that varies depending on how far a cloud site is from the golf course.
Assuming safety from a drone-path perspective, Japhet says, the entire golf course may be available for NBC to use the calibrated shot during broadcasts of the FedExCup playoffs and Presidents Cup. The drone shots, he adds, offer opportunities beyond simply showing the trace, enabling the broadcast and on-air talent to tell great stories for at-home viewers.
Noting the unique characteristics of each course, Turnbull says PGA TOUR and its partners will find ways to make the shots and broadcast pop more through the use of technology and statistics. For the upcoming BMW Championship, for example, the focus of the drone tracer technology may be on the impact of elevation on the golf ball.
Although the PGA TOUR would like to have the drone tracer technology available every week, the technology cost is substantial, per Freedman. Still, he notes that, for 2025, the TOUR will continue to target several signature events to integrate the technology.
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