BERGEN, NORWAY: Vizrt says Fox Sports employed the vendor’s live broadcast graphics technology during its HDTV coverage of the Daytona 500 in February. This marked the second consecutive season that the Vizrt graphics production workflow has been part of The Daytona 500 telecast.
For this year’s race, Fox Sports used four Viz Trio template-based, real-time 3D character generators paired with four Viz Engine 3D rendering engines for real-time compositing of graphics and video. The Viz Engines were used to generate live graphics including lower thirds, over the shoulders, full screens and the FoxBox crawl driven by real-time data of the running order of the drivers.
The main set, dubbed the Hollywood Hotel, featured the Ford Tech Center, an interactive display that leveraged a Viz Trio/Viz Engine combination feeding video and graphics to a 55-inch Perceptive Pixel touch screen. NASCAR on Fox Announcer Jeff Hammond used the touch screen to explain the technology and 3D car parts behind NASCAR vehicles. Vizrt said the scene included “over 2 million polygons running in real time on an Nvidia Quadro 6000 graphics card.”
