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Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
American football is short bursts of incredibly intricate plays in which every player is doing something worth analysis, and it provides long pauses during which that analysis can be shown from every angle possible in a three-dimensional world. The game we are talking about here is on a different time scale, in which players don't have so many set plays (since it doesn't start from the more-or-less known configuration of two separate groups facing each other), so every player needs to be inventive and adapt as the play progresses. There are also very few times when a producer can be sure nothing interesting is going to happen, so replays need to be kept to a minimum, and following the continually changing strategies might be more difficult with frequent camera-angle changes.
Also, I suspect there is a single feed for the coverage (can someone confirm?) so a video producer needs to be extra confident before interrupting the feed to however many networks to show a replay that might overrun the play that makes the game. For most American football games, I think the coverage is bought by a single network, and the person selecting the camera angles and replays works for the same people as do the announcers, so they may have more freedom to try things out.
I would also be interested in seeing what the coverage in the U.S. actually looks like (including the half-time and full-time replays), and comparing it with BBC/ITV broadcasts. Maybe we are not talking about the same thing.