broadcast football, technology, and awards

A note to my regular readers:  I've rearranged the blog's organization for hopefully easier use, including a search function and a list of all movies/shows/games discussed, with links to the appropriate postings.  Enjoy.

While prepping syllabi for the upcoming semester, I'm watching the first of this weekend's NFL wild-card playoff games (trying to get things done before the Packers-Cardinals game tomorrow afternoon so I can watch that one without trying to multi-task).  And I was musing about the "yellow line," which I'm old enough to remember televised football without (yes, I realize the grammar of this sentence is a mess).  For those who don't watch much football, this is a visual effect added to the broadcast feed (it is not on the actual playing field) to show the audiences at home how far down the field the offense needs to go to earn a first down (sometimes a blue line is also added to show where the line of scrimmage is).

Football has always seemed to me perhaps the ideal sport for television.  I still think baseball may be the best sport to attend - nothing else quite has the same ring as "take me out to the ballgame" - but it's not very exciting to watch on TV, and simply because of the number of games played (162 games per season, per team, not counting the post-season?!) there's not really much on the line in any one game.  In football, on the other hand, every game can make a difference to some team, so it's easy to take a rooting interest in almost any one.  Additionally, it has plenty of guaranteed stops in the action (unlike, say, soccer) to facilitate insertion of commercials; major plays can happen at any time so you want to watch the whole game (unlike, say, basketball, where games are almost always decided in the last few minutes); and the advantages of TV, such as the ability to show replays and get explanations and commentary from the announcers about specific plays (assuming you have decent announcers - see my earlier comments on ESPN's thankfully-over-for-the-season MNF), really enhance the viewing experience.

So there are a lot of reasons I think football is good for TV, but I was thinking about just how big a difference the yellow line makes.  What it does is make football a lot more accessible to everyone, whether or not they know much about football, in the same way that you don't have know all the intricacies of pitching in baseball or the pick-and-roll in basketball to understand the goal in each sport moment-to-moment (hitting the ball and getting the ball in the basket, respectively).  Now anyone can simply look at the screen and know that the offense is trying to get the ball past that line, and the defense is trying to prevent them from doing so.  It's just that simple.  Great invention.

What many people may not realize is the complexity of the technology that goes into this seemingly simple addition to the broadcast.  When it first appeared, it took an entire truckload of equipment to add the line just to the main wide view of the field, and the camera providing that feed couldn't pan or zoom.  Today, it appears in just about every shot of gameplay used, and is so common it seems a natural part of the broadcast.

But think about what has to happen for that yellow line to appear to be on the field as the camera pans and zooms during a game:
(1) a processor has to know where on the field the first-down marker is
(2) it has to correlate that with the signal the camera's picking up, even as the camera may pan across the field, zoom in, zoom out, etc.
(3) along the first-down line, it has to examine each pixel in the image and determine - in real-time - whether that pixel represents part of the field (which may be green grass, white or some other color of marking, or some type of snow or mud) or a person (including players who may be wearing some of the same colors as the grass or markings on the field).
(4) for those pixels that are part of the field, it has to color them with yellow and track with camera pans and zooms to keep the right pixels yellow...
(5) ...except that once the play begins, players will be moving across the line and the computer has to immediately change those parts of the picture back to the original camera image as long as a player's in that part of the picture, and then immediately back to the yellow line as soon as a player moves off that spot.

Pretty impressive, huh?  For anyone who's ever done greenscreen or motion tracking work, you can imagine how tough this is to do in real-time for a live broadcast - and really, the system makes very few mistakes given the tough job it has to do.

Video, film, and broadcast technologies are improving all the time, and in the big scheme of things the little yellow line on football game broadcasts is far from the most important.  But it's a very tangible example of how much creative and technical innovation still goes into making movies and TV better, whether through specific visible results (like the yellow line) or through gradual improvements in overall visual or sonic quality.  In the spirit of the latter, checkout this link to the just-announced winners of this year's Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the people who put on the Oscars).  These are the awards that get a brief mention during the Academy Award telecast but are not actually presented at that ceremony.  The people winning them may not get the coverage or acclaim as actors, directors, and other craftspeople involved in the film biz, but the movies we see would not be as enjoyable without their labors.  Thanks and congrats to all of them.