Stewards of the Big Game Ready To Take On the Super Bowl

NEW ORLEANS—Each broadcast network responsible for the production personnel, technologies and distribution deployed to present the Super Bowl takes the opportunity to tell the game’s story in its own unique way.

Job one for this year’s steward, Fox Sports, is to bring its personalities, such as former New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, to the table with the best tools available to tell that story, Fox Sports Executive Vice President of Technical and Field Operations Michael Davies said.

(Kickoff coverage of the Feb. 9 Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles begins at 6:30 p.m. EST. Fox Sports’ pregame starts at 1 p.m. EST. The game will air on Fox Television Stations and affiliates, as well as Fox Deportes and Telemundo. Streamers can watch the game via Tubi or FuboTV, with a free trial.)

Brady, who will be calling his first Super Bowl as an analyst, will have at his disposal an elaborate high SkyCam setup based on the new Sony HDC-P50A, a 4K box camera running at 240 frames per second. Equipped with both optical and digital zooms, the camera becomes what Davies describes as “a variety of cameras all in one.”

“One is an aerial All 22 [referring to a camera that captures all offensive and defensive players in the same shot],” Davies said. “You’ll see Tom [Brady] Telestrate on this thing all of the time because it’s what analysts want to see. They want to see everything in terms of how the plays are unfolding so they can explain what’s happening from an X’s and O’s point of view.”

“High SkyCams have been done for years,” Davies said. “Frankly, I don’t really know if we even knew why we were using them. But the one thing that the high SkyCam did was it sometimes really got in the way of how we use the low SkyCam.”

To avoid that, Fox Sports will position its high SkyCam between 55 feet and 90 feet above the field and its low SkyCam, a Sony HDC-P50, 12 feet to 35 feet off the surface. Equipped with both optical and high-resolution digital zoom, the high SkyCam can be zoomed into areas of interest and prevent “everything from looking like ants,” he said.

“Putting that [zoom capability] on the high SkyCam has been immeasurably valuable, and we tested this all the way back in the pre-season in Santa Clara with a prototype from Sony,” said Davies, adding the broadcaster brought it back for the end of the season.

Fox Sports will complement the SkyCam setup with the Sony Hawk-Eye system to do zoom-cropping. Hawk-Eye will give the Fox Sports analysts the visuals needed to discuss and explain what’s happened on the field, he added.

Camera Totals and More
Fox Sports will cover the pregame and game with 149 cameras, including 27 super slow-motion cameras, 24 robotic cameras, 23 high-resolution cameras, 12 wireless cameras and others. But that number can be a bit misleading, Davies said.

“When you get to these crazy camera totals, there are some cameras that just won’t get a tally. It just won’t happen,” he said. “They’re there just in case. Just in case that specific play—that specific little occurrence like whether the ball hit the ground or a toe crossed the line—happens.”

Fox Sports will produce the game in 1080p high dynamic range (HDR) and broadcast it in 4K HDR. Several Fox Sports distributors such as Charter Communications’ Spectrum, Comcast’s Xfinity TV, Sling TV, Verizon FiOS, YouTube TV and others, will carry the entire broadcast, including pregame, halftime and postgame, in 4K.

As with other live events, Fox Sports will produce in HDR using Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG). “That’s basically what’s available now,” Davies said. “Somewhere downstream there is a conversion to PQ [Perceptual Quantizer].”

Dolby and Comcast issued a joint press release earlier this week saying that Xfinity TV customers and Xfinity Stream App users will be able to watch in both Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos audio as part of Comcast’s new Enhanced 4K offering on X1.

Regardless of what happens downstream, Davies said the important thing HDR production must account for is that most viewers continue to watch in standard dynamic range. “It’s a matter of being able to shade in HDR but also make sure the SDR is preserved,” he said.

Fox Sports is also working with panamorphic cameras from COSM, a company specializing in immersive fan viewing experiences at its Dallas and Los Angeles venues. (COSM Los Angeles will present the Super Bowl.)

“What we do with these cameras is region of interest,” he said. Two COSM cameras will be placed on carts for shots of the sidelines and benches—a great application for the specialty cameras.

“Increasingly there are things you might want to see on the benches, but you don’t have dedicated cameras, because the cameras are all interested in what’s happening on the field,” he said.

Fox Sports will de-warp the fish-eye lens effect from the COSM cameras and pan around the video to find 16x9 areas of interest for air.

COSM cameras will also be used in all of the pylons that mark off the corners of both end zones. While the resolution of those cameras is not quite high enough for use at the COSM dome venues, the 60 fps cameras have the ability to interpolate frames to make replays smooth enough to be used, he said

“It’s really bleeding-edge stuff that we’re doing with these COSM cameras,” he said. “But the result is there’s not one square inch of the field that isn’t covered with a camera—not only that but covered well.”

Augmented Reality Graphics and Drones
For the Super Bowl, Fox Sports will use a newly developed solution for Augmented Reality graphics.

Combining a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system from Kudan, SkyTrax graphics tracking and some Fox Sports-developed software, the solution solves a problem that has plagued AR graphics that are smaller than full screen, Davies said.

“The LIDAR informs a system that is engaged with the [low] SkyCam telemetry system,” said Davies, adding that doing so increases the accuracy of positioning data—a crucial element to rock-solid augmented graphics.

“The problems in the past with reduced tracking accuracy gave rise to the possibility of shaking or mistracking,“ he said. ”The illusion of having a three-dimensional graphic on the field was completely broken when it starts not tracking accurately with the camera.”

As a result, the only safe use of augmented reality graphics was to go full-screen. “What this translates into is more confidence in being able to pop these graphics on and getting away from the full-screen graphics that take viewers out of the game,“ Davies said. “This allows us to put three-dimensional graphics in the game so viewers never actually leave the stadium and, in that way, stay more engaged.”

The broadcaster will also deploy drones as part of its coverage of the event. Given the close proximity of landmarks like Bourbon Street and the French Quarter to the stadium, drone footage will be used to give viewers the feeling of being in New Orleans.

Fox Sports is tapping the airborne expertise of Beverly Hills Aerials as it has in the past for the Daytona 500, the World Series and its last Super Bowl, to fly the drones and ensure their operation complies with league rules and local law enforcement, he said.

Shots from the drones will be used “for everything from features to added color in support of interviews and events,” Davies said.

While broadcasters have often deployed the television production equivalent of a secret weapon to cover the Super Bowl, Davies said that approach doesn’t fit in with his orientation to covering the game.

“If you bring some esoteric thing out there and that is only used once for the Super Bowl and the production team has never had a chance to use it, it’s difficult to wedge it in,” he said. “Frankly, it’s unfair to give that to a production team and just say, ‘OK, now you’ve got this thing, and you’ve got to use it and make it part of the story.’ ”

Davies is confident that whether it’s the addition of the new LIDAR technology, the COSM cameras, the high SkyCam or any of the other tech that will go into game coverage, the production team is familiar with it and ready to make it a part of the Fox Sports telling of the Super Bowl story.