Live From Super Bowl LIII: CBS Sports Set to Raise Bar on AR During Super Open; 115 Cameras Capture Game from All Angles Go inside Sundays massive production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Friday, February 1, 2019 - 3:16 pm
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The countdown to Super Bowl LIII is underway and for the production team at CBS Sports it is the culmination of years of work, site visits, and planning. As usual it's a massive effort and it will provide plenty of innovation, including a show open that no one will want to miss.
(l-to-r) Mike Francis of CBS, Brice Michoud of NCAM, Jason Cohen of CBS, and Steadicam operator Daniel Erbeck with AR rig built by The Future Group and AVS.
Patty Power, CBS Sports, EVP, operations and engineering, says the entire production, and the related efforts over the past couple of years, have been a fantastic team effort. Mike Francis, VP, remote engineering and planning, and Jason Cohen, CBS Sports, VP, remote technical operations, are both playing key roles in Super Bowl planning. Power says Francis brings the engineering expertise and Cohen, who joined CBS less than a year ago, brought trying different things to a new level.
I think we make a great team, she says.
The efforts, as usual for a Super Bowl, are impressive. The CBS presence in the compound includes 14 mobile trucks and 12 office trailers. There are 115 cameras being shared amidst 332 channels of record and playback and 2,000 channels of local intercom (and 50 channels trunked to New York) ensure that production and technical operations go smoothly. There are also five sets and Francis says that having access to dark fiber has given the team control of its own destiny with respect to sharing resources where ever they are needed. There are also 29 transmission and receive paths, five uplinks, and 10 Gbps of data circuits for file transfers as CBS leverages the team back home.
In San Francisco we had 12 edits on site and for this Super Bowl we still have 12 but six of them are here in Atlanta and six are back in New York, says Power. It's been up since Monday it has been going pretty well so far with file transfers and communication between the two teams.
ThumbWar provides the six edit systems and they are located in NEP's CBS D unit, which is the edit truck CBS relies on for golf and post season football, and two Game Creek Video edit trucks.
We were able to save a lot of set-up time as opposed to setting up in a production trailer, says Francis. Everybody has the same visibility and ability to share media and having 10 Gbps of bandwidth between the two cities obviously helps with that.
An AR Innovation
This year's efforts will actually include an impressive technical undertaking for the opening of the show as for the first time ever augmented reality will be deployed in a multicamera environment, bringing AR graphics to four camera angles that, combined, will deliver a new and exciting look to the big game and also lay the groundwork for similar innovations.
Cohen has worked closely with The Future Group, NCAM, and AVS to bring AR to not only the SkyCam but also a technojib, an all-22 angle, and then a wireless steadicam which he says has been a bit of a science project.
The production team had the idea to do a multicamera AR open, but AR has been done in a pretty conservative way for a long time, he says. And while the wireless Steadicam is cool in and of itself, it's having four very different camera rigs all working in sync as a four-camera cut to open the game that is most interesting.
The Future Group built an animatic for the open that is loaded onto an EVS and features an audio track with sound effects, music, but also an audio cue that uses time code to trigger four AR servers that are running The Future Group's Pixotope software. And the four AR servers that are all in sync with the audio cue all begin their playout of the graphics effects which is simply four cameras being played through them. And then the TD built an auto time line in the switcher so that when he says roll the embedded cue the switcher cuts all four cameras by itself, says Cohen. Assuming it all works well it goes for 20 seconds, then we have the big tease, and off we go with the game.
The AR innovations will extend beyond the show open as the main set on the concourse level also has two AR cameras that will bring a new look to coverage. The multi-camera application of AR at the top of the show, however, is what Cohen thinks will have a lasting impact.
Now we can see how AR productions can be taken to other sports, he says. It is a bit of a science project as the Steadicam operator is on a wireless rig and he has a computer technician who is tethered to him. That computer takes the tracking data off of the lens and then sends it wirelessly to the NCAM server in the truck. NCAM and AVS have been working on this in London for about four months.
Covering the Action
CBS will deploy 115 cameras, including 10 4K Sony HDC-4800 cameras with high-speed recording and zoom. And in a true innovation three Panasonic AK-SHB800 8K cameras will be deployed around the field with one above each end zone in the cat walk and then one at the all 22 position. The three Panasonic cameras will playout via Evertz Dreamcatcher replay systems while the Sony 4K systems will rely on Sony PSW-4500 replay servers.
The Panasonic 8K cameras connect to an AK-SHU800 camera control unit via two single mode fiber lines like a regular studio camera but the CCU outputs the 8K signal as four 12Gbps 4K signals. Those four 12Gbps signals are each converted to four 3Gbps signals and passed to the Dreamcatcher via 16 3Gbps inputs.
One of the plays in the AFC Championship game, a punt that appeared to have hit New England Patriot wide receiver Julian Edelman, exemplifies the benefits of having 8
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Live From Super Bowl LIII: CBS Sports Set to Raise Bar on AR During Super Open; 115 Cameras Capture Game from All Angles Go inside Sundays massive production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
