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."
The parent post shows the precise reason to move to the not-so-brain-dead SI units. 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"?
Secondly, 360ft by 160ft with 1in resolution suddenly became 4320 by 1920? How do you calculate that? Well, by multiplying with magic numbers (in per ft, ft per yard, cow length per farmer fatness etc).
In SI units, it would be 110m by 55m. I'd say the resolution would need to be at least 1cm (when a line on the field is about 10cm [4in], you'll need at least a tenth of that for nice rounded lines for some sports).
110m by 55m equals 11000cm by 5500cm.
Hence, you'd need 11000 by 5500. You need not know magic numbers. You need not multiply with any non-power-of-ten number.
How is this not easier, more logic, quicker for mental calculation?
I'm sure the parent poster had to use some kind of calculator (or a google query) to find out what resolution would be needed.
Paaaaaathetic.
Even by using a fraction (or multiple) of 1cm, you'd still go through cm and then add/divide. You do this easily by simple mental math.
The britts could do it, now it's you turn, Yanks.
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...
yea. when forrest gump won, i was like... Yaa, and everyone else was like.. hurrdurrrhurrr, and when i heard them i was like... tchaa.. and they were like ohhh and i was like...yea! and they were all like ooooooh.