Houston Theater to Brodacast National Championship in 3-D

From Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/6198961.html


Oklahoma and Florida fans can follow their teams' pursuit of the BCS national championship from a new dimension at a Houston theater.

Rave Motion Pictures’ Rave Yorktown, 15900 Yorktown Crossing Blvd., is one of 35 theaters nationwide airing a 3-D broadcast of the Sooners-Gators game, the latest attempt by sports leagues, TV networks and technology companies to take sports beyond HDTV.

Tickets are $25 each (special plastic 3-D glasses are included), and about half of the 300 seats at the theater, which is equipped with a 30-foot screen, had been sold as of Wednesday.

3Alitiy Digital of Burbank, Calif., will use eight Sony 3-D cameras to shoot the game. The 3-D feed will be mixed with sound from the Fox Sports broadcast crew and piped by satellite to theaters nationwide.

“I started this company because the thing I wanted to watch the most was a broadcast of the Super Bowl in 3-D,” said Steve Schklair, founder and CEO of 3Ality Digital Systems. “Sports is about geography to a point, with the players moving in space, and nothing can show that better than 3-D.”

Viewers will see the game from a new perspective. While traditional football broadcasts use a high camera mounted at midfield to show plays as they unfold, Schklair said 3-D images are most effective when the objects are moving toward the camera.

So 3Ality will have two cameras in the stands and six closer to the field. Cameramen will shoot each play from either the end zone or from a high camera mounted at a 45-degree angle to the play rather than the straight-ahead shots used by traditional broadcasts, and cameras closer to the field will be used for replay shots.

“The traditional shot is more of an east-west orientation,” he said. “We will try to do more of it as north-south.”

Each 3-D camera position has two cameras, focused by the cameraman through a single viewfinder. 3Ality’s technology combines data from the two lenses – one for the left eye, one for the right – into a single HD picture that can be processed by a standard TV production truck. It then sends the signal to the theaters, where a decoder splits the signal into left eye and right eye images.

Given the rapid action of sports, Schklair said one of the toughest parts of showing a live game in 3-D is keeping the same depth of field when moving between camera angles.

“Keeping consistent depth when you have a close-up cutting to a wide shot is the biggest challenge,” he said. “And we’re still working on what to do with graphics as we cut between cameras so the audiences’ eyes don’t jump around in their heads.”

Another challenge is maintaining perfect alignment between the two images.

“There cannot be any vertical deviation on a pixel level,” he said. “Pixel 2415 on the left and pixel 2415 on the right have to be the same. We use image processing software that controls the camera and keeps things accurate.”

The cameras shoot at 60 fames per second, twice the speed of a normal camera, which helps smooth out the picture and eliminates jerky movements that would be distracting to viewers.

3Ality first tested its 3-D techniques at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in 2004. It shot an NFL game last month that was aired to a closed-circuit audience, and Turner Sports will beam its NBA All-Star Saturday Night to the Rave Yorktown and other theaters next month.

Schklair is optimistic that the broadcast will be glitch-free.

“We have it down now,” he said. “That’s not to say everything is perfect yet. There’s a long way to go. But when you watch a game in 3-D and everything works, which is almost all the time, it’s unbelievable, absolutely amazing.”


Definitely wouldn't mind checking this out, I heard Dan Patrick talking about it on his radio show and said it was something every sports fan should experience.