The Indian Super League has chosen sports production tool provider Vizrt to supply its graphics production for the 2015 season.
Sports television graphics company Alston Elliot (AE) have designed the graphics workflow around its own in-house football applications and data systems. It’s then used to create match day presentation graphics, augmented reality elements, and a studio-based touchscreen.
The Hero Indian Super League football championship is in its second year and features a total of 61 matches between the league’s eight franchises. The tournament is a drive towards India qualifying for the upcoming World Cup and for the U17 tournament being held in 2017.
For graphics production, AE uses a combination of Vizrt’s character generator (CG), Viz Trio, and AE’s own bespoke software applications. This produces presentation graphics including scoreboards, statistics, the play clock and lower thirds. Controlled remotely from the Mumbai studio, the application allows users to control the video and graphics output and make changes to graphics whenever necessary.
While the match day presentation graphics are added to the broadcast from a central studio, OB facilities at each game include a one-stop telestration and augmented reality (AR) solution. Viz Arena is part of this system, augmenting 3D graphics, providing analysis tools, and inserting virtual advertising into the broadcast feed.
Additional augmented elements are implemented into the Mumbai studio touchscreen as an extension of the AR graphics delivered at the OB truck. This is through Vizrt graphics-driven environment supported by custom, AE-designed plugins.
This system design means the entire solution is scalable. AE can employ any number of Viz engines to recognise events raised via the touchscreen and render the graphics needed. This allows Alston Elliot to add any number of more complex graphics to the live production.
“Every time we look at designing a touchscreen like this, we analyse how we did it last time and find a way to improve it,” said Chris Izatt, senior Ddesigner at Alston Elliot. “Using this Vizrt graphics setup we were able to implement a technically ambitious application.”
“This project and our partnership with Alston Elliot is a testament to our leading live sports production tools,” said Stephan Würmlin Stadler, EVP sports at Vizrt. “We design our solutions to be highly flexible, suiting our partners and customers’ specific needs. That’s just what AE did here – they found a way that would make our products work for them and implemented a very innovative system.”
