Digital Video at the Olympics..................................
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Nagano's Winter Games Feature First All-Digital Broadcasts
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The lutzes, luges and ad-libs of the Nagano Games are being transmitted through a broadcast center that for the first time in Olympics history is a fully digital facility, CBS Sports says.
The games in Japan also will serve as a showcase for some cutting-edge technology that should reveal with clarity what usually occurs too fast for the naked eye.
Operating out of an International Broadcast Center suite installed by Sony Electronics Inc., CBS Sports will rely on more than 60 Sony DVW-Digital Betacam recorders at the IBC. The 55,000-square-foot facility-formerly a cotton mill-houses two control rooms (one with editing capability) plus eight dedicated editing booths and a studio for CBS, which plans morning, late night and weekend broadcasts. There also are facilities for working on audio post production, graphics, 3D-graphics, music and videotape dubbing. The array of control-room equpment will include the Tektronix Event Management System, a video file server that permits crews to do such features as slow-motion instant replay, simple highlights packages and custom-edited promos.
In addition, CBS has installed editing facilities at some of Nagano's 15 venues, particularly those in which events will be shown at prime time in the U.S. For example, CBS put digital disk recorders at the site of the Alpine ski events so it can compress the time interval between when competitors compete and when CBS can get that coverage onto the air.
All told, CBS Sports plans 128 hours of coverage of the Olympic Winter games. Broadcasts will begin some days as early as 7 a.m. ET and end other days as late as 3:30 a.m., as Nagano time is 14 hours ahead of New York. The games will end Sunday, Feb. 22.
Most countries' network broadcasts are handled by a corps of announcers and engineers who rely on a common feed of coverage arranged by the host country. CBS, in contrast, has sent 1,500 people to Nagano and intends to rely on host coverage only at the curling and biathlon venues. Its figure skating coverage won't need the pool cameras at all. For example, it will have 21 cameras of its own at the White Ring arena.
Similarly, prime-time broadcasts won't take place at the IBC but rather will occur from a three-story, glass-enclosed studio erected on the grounds of the 1,400-year-old Zenkoji Temple. The control room will be at the IBC, though, with the three-mile distance linked by fiber-optic cables.
The fiber connection continues with a transpacific, digitally compressed link from Nagano to Los Angeles. Backup service will come from an Intelsat satellite transmitting at 45 Mbps. From California, the feeds will be sent via fiber on a 45 Mbps AT&T line to CBS' broadcast center in New York, where commercials will be dropped into the feed and then sent out to CBS affiliates. Tektronix systems will be used for the compression of digital signals and the distribution of the feeds.
Additionally, two digitally compressed paths (at 22.5 Mbps each) from Nagano were leased by Turner Sports and CBS/Newspath. The latter is the news and sports source that provides regular feeds to CBS-owned TV stations and CBS affiliates.
The network said it found that leasing a full-time compressed path was "significantly more cost-effective" than leasing satellite time on a one-time-only basis.
The main control room at the IBC will treat all Nagano as its studio. Every camera will connect straight to the IBC as an isolated feed, using fiber-optic paths with various levels of redundancy to feed digitally encoded audio and video. Once the signal reaches IBC, it will be mixed with graphics and videotape. Only camera shading and audio mixing take place on site.
Along with its fixed locations, CBS will rely on four mobile trucks equipped with cameras from Hitachi. There will be three expandable units with a total of 18 Hitachi SKF-710 and nine SKF-3 cameras plus a stand-alone RGB truck with three SKF-300 and three SKF-3 cameras. CBS used these at the Winter Games in Albertville, France, and Lillehammer, Norway.
Aside from the fiber-optic links, CBS plans to use two ENG vans to transmit from various points, plus a truck leased from NTT Telecommunications that uses the KU band.
Computer-generated images also will get a bigger workout at this Olympics than ever before. One feature CBS is promoting heavily is a project it did with ReZ.n8 of Los Angeles to illustrate an ice-skating jump called the quadruple toe loop. By attaching about two dozen sensors to the body of a figure skater and using eight infrared cameras to shoot a skater doing the maneuver, ReZ.n8 generated a computer image showing the jump from any point above, below or 360 degrees around.
CBS plans to use this image to help explain why the quadruple toe loop has become such an important test for gold-medal aspirants, and will use it on a split-screen against a still of an actual competitor to show why the skater did or didn't succeed in making the jump.
ReZ.n8 also worked with CBS to develop a virtual-reality simulation showing a downhill ski run from the skier's point of view. Part of this project involved recording the entire topgraphy of the Happo'one mountain where Alpine events will take place. The technology can be used if a particular section of the run proves treacherous by breaking down the topography of that particular area. CBS says. ReZ.n8 did similar work on the bobsled run, giving viewers the chance to see the course from the athlete's perspective, from above, behind or even below the track. A laser-beam trajectory added to the digitized run will depict the idea course down the mountain.
Once the Olympic flame is doused at Nagano, CBS' role in the games will end, but Sony's won't. The company last June signed an agreement in principle to be NBC's technology provider for U.S. broadcasts of the games in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. (Sony Electronics, Laura Whitaker, 408/955-5456; CBS, Karen Mateo, 212/975-6788; Tektronix, Laura Barber, 503/627-6240) |
