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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."
Hmmm... A new trend? No longer reading 'have not RTFA' but 'have not Viewed TFA'? /. coming to.
Dear oh dear, what is
I already knew in pretty significant detail how all this works, but there was a lot of additional information in the video that never made it to the PR-sanitized behind-the-scenes descriptions of the technology.
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.
Would be a field that uses clear/transparent turf. and all colors on the field are defined by lights under it. The white in the 10/20/30... could be done dynamically, the end zones could be designed dynamically and relit, heck, you could switch from a green field to Boise State's blue.
This could be used to make the same field a football field, soccer field, lacrosse, field hockey... all without the the clutter of all the lines on one field.
This might be tricky with turf technology currently, but I feel like a first technology to do this might be a basketball court (lights for basketball, volleyball, etc)...
It probably isn't feasible, but would be interesting.
That's true, but I was always more fascinated by the stuff they did for NASCAR. Not only do they use on-screen tech, but they also make use of GPS to do those fancy graphics showing info on the cars while they're moving on the road.
There was an article about this particular tech NASCAR uses in some magazine, but I can not for the life of me remember it, nor can I find any videos demonstrating it...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
And it was awesome that Pixar reproduced these glitches in the opening scenes Cars.
What really brought it home (so to speak) for me was baseball. If you look carefully, occasionally you can notice that the advertising behind the batter doesn't quite move with the rest of the frame when the camera shakes. While the yellow line couldn't be taken as really existing, you could believe the advertising was actually on the wall.
While that's harmless enough, it shows that convincing covert alterations in real time are also possible.