How are those amazing yellow and blue lines drawn on football fields? Michael King, field operations manager for SportVision, says you start with a precision map of the playing field, using the camera location as the zero point, to create a very specific field map. Enhanced “pan” heads, in effect, tell the 3D wire-frame how to move, in perfect synchronization with every camera move. The data is sent from the camera back to the TV production truck and combined with the camera’s video output. “The last part of the equation is the video,” says King. “Down that same triax cable, the camera’s video is sent to the camera control unit in the production truck, and they pass that signal on to our computers where the video and data meet. The day before the game, we register the video to the data, and essentially, we line up the real world with the virtual world.”
—Paul Berliner, “Video World,” PLSN, Dec. 2008
