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With more matches broadcast than ever before, some
in 360-degrees and plans for an UHD HDR upgrade, Wimbledon braces
for two weeks of centre attention
With no Wimbledon in 2020
and the event only operating at half crowd capacity in 2021, the Championship is
back to full strength this year - and then some.
For the first time, every match from all 18 courts
across every single competition will be broadcast – men’s and women’s singles
and doubles and mixed doubles. In addition, every match from invitational events,
14&U Juniors and wheel chair events are covered too along with extended
coverage of the qualifying tournament – a fitting celebration for the centenary
of the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s move to its current site at Church Road,
SW19.
“From a broadcast perspective we were already at a
high benchmark but we’ve made good on our philosophy of being able to deliver
player specific coverage to every broadcast rights holder (spanning some 200
territories),” says Paul
Davies, Head of Production, AELTC which produces the host broadcast. “So that means multi-camera junior match coverage
and even commentary on those matches.”
Coverage of qualifying has been upgraded from one
court to a multi-court presentation. “We had a single camera on one court
(taking a master shot) but by using a single camera with a couple of RF cams we
can switch courts quite easily. It’s not just British players either but a
global offering. There’s always great passion at the qualifying
competition.”
This year is also the first to see live action on
the middle Sunday with no break in 14 days. The Sunday will also feature a
special centenary programme featuring many past Wimbledon champions
live on court.
That additional load brings its own challenges for
the broadcast and media teams. “We never know how long a day’s play is going to
be so we have to be careful to manage people’s times during that week,” Davies
says.
The ability to increase coverage is partly based on
the use of robotic camera systems in situ at seven courts since 2018. Eleven of the 18 courts are crewed by
camera-operators and seven are robotic, using cameras augmented by Fletcher
Group’s Tr-ACE system. This uses LiDAR sensing to pick up details on each
player and then creates a 3D model of the match, allowing the robotic camera
heads to track the action without the need for human intervention.
Matches requiring a touch more storytelling can be
controlled by a camera operator and a director in the onsite broadcast centre.
They can vision mix and tighten or widen the automated shots.
Facilities infrastructure and workflow
NEP is in the final year of its five year contract
as facility provider to the Championships and is outfitting the central
broadcast facility, which is part MCR and part derigged galleries, as well as
individual trucks for production of Centre and No.1.
“It keeps the technology in the truck which has
everything in it to produce that court including a prebuilt gallery,” explains
James Muir, Broadcast Technical Manager. “It also provides redundancy. For
example, on finals weekend because we have the truck on its own in the compound
hardwired to an uplink vehicle we could turn the entire broadcast centre off
and still get Centre to air.”
In terms of workflow, essentially each court is
treated as its own production, with 18 OBs of varying sizes with their own replay
EVS operating simultaneously at peak. All match footage is centrally ingest
along with comps and isolated camera reels – all the material you’d expect from
a major sports event - made available over an EVS network to broadcasters
onsite.
For rights holders offsite, live match feeds are
being contributed under IMG management over Eurovision, Globecast, ESPN (for
LatAm) and Telstra (for Asia) networks. Everything else such as wire-cam shots,
ENG, beauty camera loops, ISOs and highlights is being fed into NEP Mediabank,
a cloud-based media management platform.
“Instead of clogging up storage and the bandwidth
we send everything except match feeds over Mediabank,” explains Muir. “Right
holders can record any match feed they want on their own systems at home. We
have some broadcasters who generate their own workflow where they will remote
access the content that is here but use their own file transfer to get the
content offsite. Our view is we don’t want to be prescriptive, so there is a
complete onsite solution, an onsite file delivery with offsite browsing and an
offsite browsing with offsite file delivery.”
Davies says the overriding goal is to ensure that
rights holding broadcasters have all the assets they need to produce the Wimbledon experience. This detail extends to enabling
a broadcaster to book a beauty cam and direct it themselves, for example,
zooming a wire-cam from across the practice courts into their studio or
stand-up location.
Preparing for major UHD upgrade
Centre Court is being produced in UHD HDR in a
continuation of a format first introduced in 2018 but is still being produced
separately from the HD feed. This is a hangover from the days when the
overriding concern was to protect the HD feed which the majority of the
audience was watching.
That changes from 2023 when every manually crewed
court will be delivered in a single HDR workflow. This year affords a chance to
test those workflows using court side systems cameras that have been
standardised on Sony 3500s.
“Part of the work for this year is to compare how
dual UHD HDR and HD SDR workflows we’ve been used to compare with the single
UHD workflows we will move to,” explains Muir. “We have a
chance to check side by side for instance whether the green of the grass on
Centre court looks like it should do once its been through the
conversions.”
From 2023 the robotic courts will remain 1080p SDR;
the show courts produced in HD HDR and Centre will be joined by No.1 in UHD
HDR.
There’s reasonable demand for the higher format.
The BBC for example outputs Centre in UHD HDR and there’s a lot of enquiries in
Asia also.
“It will mean we can offer Centre and No.1 in UHD
so there’s more chance of always having UHD tennis to go to and less chance of
having a half hour gap in the schedule when there is none.”
360- Behind the Scenes
With Vodafone, the event’s new official
‘Connectivity Partner’, a version of the Wimbledon Channel
will be offered in 360-degrees. The Wimbledon Channel
is the AELTC’s own platform and provides a behind the scenes look at the
Championship with occasional live match action. Renamed Wimbledon Uncovered this will be presented as usual as
a 2D stream and in 360 using feeds from nine VR cameras at positions including
on Centre and courts 1-3 for live action.
“If we’re showing content where we don’t have a 360
version, such as a press conference, we will insert the 2D feed into the
Jumbotron on Henman Hill (only viewable on the app) and wrap that image in a
360-degree camera feed on the Hill so the viewer remains in the VR
environment,” explains Davies.
Match points
In recent years the recording and analysis of match
data has grown into a huge enterprise. Management of it at Wimbledon falls to IBM and starts with the Umpire
whose inputs are the official match score. This is supplemented by courtside
loggers – a combination of IBM data specialists and tennis experts - who input
qualitative descriptors. Other data is pulled from Hawk-eye. SportsMedia
Technology, (SMT), a provider of live data integration and real time graphics
presentation together with JTC help deliver the integration of IBM data to the
broadcast feed.
“What we’re looking to do this year is to
converge the data with the broadcast output more than ever to tell richer
stories,” Davies says. “We’ll share information with media partners and our
social media teams. Commentators can ask our data teams questions that we can
illustrate with data. IBM is also looking at how we can scrape even more data
from all the various input points to tell stories about how tennis is
changing.”
Carlos Alcaraz is a case in point. The Spanish
tennis sensation is using dropshots more frequently and more aggressively on
hard / clay courts than perhaps any player previously, and data driven analysis
of his matches can spotlight this.
“We’ve looked at AI options but right now it’s not
able to capture everything we need,” says Georgie
Green, Broadcast & Production Manager. “We need
human eyes to make sure everything is logged as we want it.”
Historically the BBC been integral to the host
broadcast production and it remains a hugely important partner to the AELTC. “We’re trying to better streamline the logging
codes that we use to be compatible with the BBC library as well as ensure that
search is easy on IMG Replay,” says Green.
In addition, the entire Wimbledon archive is now digitized and available for
users to clip into programming from IMG Replay, a cloud-based
solution.
Host camera plan In stats
118 x cameras on all courts (typically 29 on
Centre, 18 on No.1 and 4-5 each on the rest), PLUS
21 x beauty cams
5 x cams in press area (for press conferences)
9 x 360 camera positions
2 x 500m long wire-cam in UHD HDR
Netcams on Centre & No.1
4 railcams – two on outside courts plus Centre
& No.1
New POV cams on either side of Umpire Chair on No.1
and Centre
Cherry picker for coverage across site with camera
on gyro stabilised rig
New telescopic tower camera for crowd shots across
‘tea lawn’
New low-reverse cameras on 5 outside courts
29 – number of cameras on Centre Court
18 – number of cameras on No.1 court
Pre-Championship drone shoot available for rights
holders to insert in coverage (no live drone for health and safety)
All the above supplemented by additional rights
holder broadcaster positions
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