AUGUSTA, GA
Golf is big business for CBS Sports, and there's no bigger event than the Master's Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, April 8-12. The network will showcase the action on Saturday, and provide Thursday and Friday highlights. ESPN will provide live coverage Wednesday through Friday, as well as replays and highlights.
CBS will up the ante on last year's pyrotechnics by providing more live video feeds (adding another mobile unit to accommodate them) and expanding the scope of the high-end animation solution it used last year for a better look at the action at the cups. Last year, CBS delivered the new animation from holes 10-17; this year 8th, 9th and 18th were added.
The production was a joint effort by the Augusta National Golf Club, CBS, and Archiform 3D, a Miami-based global provider of 3D virtual reality presentations usually rendered for real estate and golf resorts.
"Augusta had already mapped the course," said CBS Sports Director Steve Milton. "Archiform 3D took those mappings and overlaid the video on top of it."
The ProTracer system generates real-time trajectory of a ball shot by golfer Steve Flesch at the 13th hole of the Northern Trust Open. Specifically, Archiform 3D's president went up in a helicopter provided by CBS and shot HD stills of the entire course, which became the basis for gridded computer files of the layout. Milton said the process took about 18 months to finish.
"The rendering process involves hundreds of computer clusters—you don't really render from the first frame to the end frame," he said. Milton explained that ArchiForm's software parameters select the best aspects of each hole, then "marries" them together.
The final animation product is matched with golf footage previously recorded by an EVS system.
As for the increased number of live video feeds, the broadcaster intended to cover every shot on "Amen Corner" (11th, 12th and 13th holes) and almost every shot at the 15th and 16th holes, according to Ken Aagaard, executive vice president, engineering, operations and production Services for CBS Sports.
In addition, highlights carried online and by DirecTV—a 15 minute loop last year—will now include live player interviews by the clubhouse interspersed with highlights and a continual update of what's going on across the board, he said.
GRAPHIC COVERAGE
Wireless versions of two key graphics production tools—ProTracer and SwingVision—will be standard equipment at other PGA events covered by CBS this season.
The Swedish ProTracer system superimposes graphics illustrating the flight and trajectory of a golf ball on a video stream of the shot, using a CMOS sensor and proprietary software. This enables the viewer to see the player, the golf course and the ball flight. Until this year, the ProTracer system was hard-wired.
"With the wireless system the operator brings the server in a backpack," said company spokesman Erik Bohman, in comparing the new equipment with the hard-wired version, which puts the server in a truck.
The company's first TV network trial came at February's Northern Trust Open, according to Bohman. ProTracer CTO Frederik Stridsman operated the new equipment for the CBS Sports broadcast.
"We were able to set up shots on the fairway—which is pretty cool," said Aagaard. "It gave the viewer a real look at a hook and a slice coming in a way that the ball approaches the green versus just off the tee."
Plans are in motion for an inbound trajectory that would enable the camera to be put greenside and track the ball coming off the tee onto the green.
Future upgrades are also underway for the wireless SwingVision, a high-speed camera system made by Salem, Mass.-based Tech Imaging Services. First adopted in a hard-wired version by CBS Sports in 2004, SwingVision garnered the broadcast network a George Wensel Outstanding Innovative Technical Achievement Award Emmy in 2006.
But a mobile system needed to be designed to capture the more interesting shots in golf—the tricky lie in the long rough, the artful left-to-right fade around a tree, the blast out of a plugged lie in a sand trap. The equipment went wireless during the last PGA tournament of 2007. At press time, the company was testing a high-speed camera upgrade.
"We'll be migrating to the Photron [FASTCAM] SA2 probably at the midway point of this season," said Matt Kearney, Tech Imaging Services vice president. "It has much higher resolution, so we'll be able to shoot 2,000 frames per second at 1080p—or 4,000 to 5,000 fps at 720p resolution."
That would cut down considerably on the blur from a tightly shot ball being launched at Tiger Wood's feet. "We're going to have at least one system on every tournament that we do," Aagaard said. "It's really an incredible tool to look at close shots of the way a guy comes out of a bunker, out of a rut; to see how his club goes through [a swing]."
