Slashdot Mirror
The Technology Behind the Magic Yellow Line
CurtMonash writes "Fandome offers a fascinating video explaining how the first-down line on football broadcasts actually works. Evidently, theres a lot of processing both to calculate the exact location being photographed on the field — including optical sensors and two steps of encoding — and to draw a line in exactly the right place onscreen. For those who don't want to watch the whole video, highlights are here."
Plus, you get to see the ugly UI that appears to have been built as an afterthought - just like the UI of all the other industrial television software I've operated.
It's true, 90% of software that I've used in a television studio has a poorly designed, or worse, broken, user interface. Gets the job done but in the most convoluted way. The only well made interfaces are the ones by major companies who have been around for a while, ie Newtek, Adobe, Pinnacle, Chyron.
Well, when you have a user base in the dozens, and operating the UI is the user's entire job, it doesn't have to be intuitive or even easy. It's cheaper to teach a few dozen guys how to use a bad UI than it is to design and program a really good UI.
Honestly, the UI in the video didn't seem too bad though (from a 10-second impression). Sure it was ugly but it seemed to have useful features for the operator; did you notice when the guy dragged the line of scrimmage past the first down marker it automatically reset the first down marker to +10 yards?
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
"First of all, when someone writes "football" on slashdot. Is he referring to what is commonly known as "football" all over the world, i.e. "soccer" or what is commonly referred to all over the world as "american football"?"
Sometimes a single word has more than one meaning, especially among different cultures. When that is the case, you have to use something called context to derive which meaning the word has. So "football" could mean a few different things when written on Slashdot depending on who wrote it. Lucky for us, we're given a LOT of context here. Given that we're talking about first down lines and there's ample video showing the sport in question, the context should be pretty obvious. But since you're confused, what they're referring to would likely translate to "American football" in your vernacular.
The traditional system of measurement that exists here rarely causes significant difficulties in every day life.
200g of steak mince per person. 17 people. I'll have 3400g please.
6oz of steak mince per person. 17 people. 102oz... but I can't ask for that. How many pounds?
Large bottle of vodka: 1 litre. 1000mL. Double measure: 50mL. Bottle has 20 double measures.
Normal bottle: 0.75L. 15 double measures.
I think you buy vodka in a "fifth", a fifth of a gallon, and I think a double measure would be 2 fluid ounces. Erm...
My wall: 4.37m by 2.39m. Area: 4.37m*2.39m = 10.4m^2. The can of paint covers 10m^2, damn.
Your wall: 14 feet 4 inches by 7 feet 10 inches. Area... 172in * 94in = 16168 square inches ~= 112 square feet. The paint covers 10 square yards, is there enough? (No)
I don't really see how the benefits would outweigh the costs of forcing people to switch over. Many things are already labeled with both sets of units anyways.
Due to pressure from the EU ;-).
I have a set of SI wrenches and a set of "standard" wrenches.
That's twice as many wrenches as you'd need if everything came with one system of fixings.