BBC Sport will rely on Vizrt HD graphics engines for its live television graphics used during the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Working with Vizrt are two London-based graphics providers, Mammoth Graphics and deltatre. The two firms will use their Vizrt expertise to design, operate and manage the delivery of the live HD graphics, which will be based within the broadcaster’s studio at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in London.
The graphics suite is equipped with 12 Viz Trio character generator (CG) systems, with each of six Trio live graphics systems paired with six Viz Engine HD/SD rendering systems for real-time compositing of HD video and graphics.
Two Trio/Engine combinations will be dedicated to graphics creation for BBC-1, while two more combos will support different events being carried on BBC-3, a channel targeted at a relatively younger demographic. The remaining two Trio/Engine combos will serve as spares for fail-safe redundancy. All of the Vizrt systems will have access to all live video feeds coming into the IBC from all the venues, and many live graphics will integrate live video.
“All graphics and templates will have a unique BBC style created in advance using Viz Artist design software including full-screens, lower-thirds and side panels, as well as a 3-D medals table that illustrates the medals count by nation,” said Phil Long, managing director of Mammoth Graphics. “Most of the graphics for nearly three dozen sports—roughly 2500 events—will be live and coming from the Vizrt boxes.”
Mammoth Graphics collaborated with live graphics vendor Kenziko to create KineTrak, which will debut on the London Summer Games. KineTrak will detect and interpret human movements to allow on-camera presenters to control and manipulate the presentation of live graphics.
See Vizrt at IBC2012 Stand 7.A10.
