Canon Lenses Used to Capture Super Bowl Action

Mobile production company NEP Broadcasting employed 38 Canon long-zoom HDTV field lenses and portable HDTV zoom lenses to cover Super Bowl XLIV.

“Image quality is of paramount importance when shooting an event such as the Super Bowl,” stated George Hoover, chief technology officer of NEP Broadcasting. “We’ve been using Canon HDTV lenses during this entire football season, leading right up to the Super Bowl. When the sun goes down during the game, you need good sensitivity, good light-handling capability, and low ramping so that when you’re at the end of that 100x or 86x lens’s zoom range that light level isn’t falling off. These Canon HDTV lenses provided that.”

Hoover reported that the longest reach at the game came courtesy of six Canon XJ100x9.3B

IE-D and 18 XJ86x9.3B IE-D long-zoom HDTV field lenses, all of which feature Shift-IS, Canon’s unique second-generation built-in Optical Shift Image Stabilizer Technology to ensure steady shots whatever the zoom range might be. “When you’re zoomed in really tight with the long-zoom lenses and you’re moving down the sideline in the cart, the capabilities of Canon’s Image Stabilization is of great importance,” Hoover noted.

NEP Broadcasting’s roving hand-held HDTV cameras, meanwhile, were outfitted with a combination of 16 Canon HJ21ex7.5B IRSE and HJ22ex7.6B IRSE long focal-length HDTV zoom lenses, as well as two HJ11ex4.7B IRSE wide-angle portable HDTV zoom lenses. The mobile production crew also mounted three Canon HJ40x10B IASD-V highly telephoto portable HDTV zoom lenses on robotic cameras atop goal posts for unique POV (point-of-view) shots.

“Canon is honored to be the HDTV lens brand of choice by major production companies for Super Bowl coverage, year after year,” stated Larry Thorpe, national marketing executive of the Broadcast and Communications division of Canon U.S.A., Inc. “Canon has been at the forefront of advancing optical technology for HDTV content creation for decades. This enables Canon to provide broadcasters and other creative program producers with a wide range of highly sophisticated operational advantages in its HDTV lenses. Depending on the type and model of Canon HDTV lens, these advantages can include such features as Auto Focus, Shift-IS Optical Shift-Image Stabilizer Technology, and Canon’s exclusive Digital Servo System for microcomputer compensation of lens-focus breathing (the inadvertent alteration of field of view when operating the focus control) or Canon’s unique eDrive for precise and repeatable programming of iris, focus, and zoom settings on portable HDTV lenses.”