The Producer Report: The World Cup


a range of sports events, but particularly football, rugby and tennis.” The corporation recently delivered the world’s


first 3d-equipped OB truck in conjunction with Telegenic, which played a key role in supporting a live 3d broadcast of a Manchester United game on the new Sky 3d channel. To deliver 25 World Cup games live in 3d, Sony


is working very closely with three companies. Host Broadcast Services (HBS) has been appointed by FIFA to take overall responsibility for the 3d production, recording and live distribution, while the UK’s Telegenic and France’s AMP Visual TV are working under the direction of HBS: “It’s the joint expertise of all these companies, both creative and technical, that forms the backbone of this project,” said Bush. To make the matches a reality, both AMP and


Telegenic are providing a complete 3d production unit, each of which consists of a 3d-equipped outside broadcast vehicle and technical and production crews. One of the trucks will shuttle between the two Johannesburg venues (Soccer City and Ellis Park) while the other will manage


production of matches at Durban, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. “Both trucks are fully equipped with Sony technology,” says Bush. “Right through from 3d cameras to vision mixers, 3d monitors and stereoscopic imaging technology.”


STEREO 3D IMAGE PROCESSING The OB solutions include Sony HDC-1500 cameras, professional Sony 3d monitors, a native 1080p MVS-8000 mixer and a completely new real-time 3d processing system. The latter is the special ingredient in the 3d workflow – the MPE- 200 Stereoscopic Imaging Processor. “This magic black box lies at the heart of


delivering quality content captured at pitch side onto the screen,” reveals Bush. “It works to automatically resolve, in real time, any imperfections in mechanical and electronic alignment between the two cameras in a Stereoscopic 3d camera system.” Based on the powerful Cell processing engine


(which provides the graphics capability of the Playstation 3) developed by Sony and IBM, the system is built from the ground up to work with


Summer 2010 theproducer 31


Photo by Ian Walton © 2010 Getty Images


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