More and more clubs, stadium owners, sports federations, leagues and rights holders in the sports industry have started to professionalize. Burgeoning revenues from broadcasters for sports content licenses help finance the large budgets for these sports stakeholders. They also want more content control over game footage, training sessions, surveillance activity and player analysis through video capture and management.
Application
More and more clubs, stadium owners, sports federations, leagues and rights holders in the sports industry have started to professionalize. Burgeoning revenues from broadcasters for sports content licenses help finance the large budgets for these sports stakeholders. They also want more content control over game footage, training sessions, surveillance activity and player analysis through video capture and management.
Traditional industry players such as facilitators and TV producers have built their businesses around mobile production methods for broadcasters. Many of these methods are cumbersome and inefficient, and they do not give their customers full control. Camargus, a Belgium-based supplier of multi-camera and video stitching systems to the broadcast and media production market, have come up with a solution for these issues: permanent stadium video infrastructure technology based on camera virtualization. The application is sold as a boxed infrastructure component and comes in the form of an advanced video server with unmanned, passive camera frontend. This package gives the user full control over content creation, live and in post-production.
Solution and Benefits
To provide sports industry stakeholders with this increased freedom of choice for their content creation, Camargus developed a capture platform consisting of unmanned camera systems that “see everything” and produce software-based virtual views that are decoupled from physical cameras. An array of miniature cameras – Basler aviators – forms a panoramic view of a soccer match, for instance. The camera images are stitched together producing a virtual view, which allows the user to look around and zoom in as if he were operating the virtual camera himself. A software user interface combined with a joystick controller facilitates virtual camera operation and real-time video editing. The server backend continuously records all the streams so that nothing is missed, and the virtual camera operator can even have a look round after the match.
For sports video productions, high frame rates are an absolute must, which is why the Basler aviator camera was selected for this application in the first place. The cameras deliver 2MP at 60 frames per second over a single GigE connection. Its flexibility and excellent price-performance ratio made GigE the interface of choice for the required data transmission volumes. Smooth 50 or 60 fps videos in combination with high-quality CCD sensors deliver pictures that easily rival traditional broadcast cameras.
Until recently, the TV producer alone decided which scene was to be captured and broadcasted. Now all sports stakeholders in a stadium have access to this new camera system through a simplified management interface that allows them to shape the content mix to suit their individual needs. The cameras capture the decisive one-on-one scenes and everything else that is happening on the pitch as well. Half-time or post-match analyses can now provide more comprehensive, in-depth context for a crucial game situation and how it developed in the background, long before that one final picture that would normally be captured by a standard camera. As Tom Mertens, CEO of Camargus, proudly summarizes: “The panoramic camera system makes content creation ubiquitous: always on, always available, capturing everything on the field, all the time.”