ESPN 3D’s Airing of BCS Title Game Shows Artifacts

LAS VEGAS -- ESPN 3D kicked off a 135-event year with the Allstate BCS Championship Game Monday night, renting the Las Vegas Hotel Theater for select CES attendees to view the Alabama-LSU football game won by Alabama. The telecast, ESPN’s 188th 3D production, marked the first time the Championship game had been shown in 3D and will be followed by a host of 3D events ESPN plans to show over the year including the Winter X Games, Wimbledon tennis and NCAA men’s football and basketball games, Bryan Burns, ESPN vice president-strategic planning, told us.

The CES viewing show, which received several callouts from announcers during commercial breaks of the 3D telecast, was sponsored by RealD. Passive 3D Glasses were provided by Marchon, which had a selection of eight models for attendees to choose from.

ESPN used 10 3D cameras for the telecast and one 2D camera, said Phil Orlins, coordinating producer. ESPN 3D also had access to some of the 2D cameras used on the regular ESPN feed, he said. We noticed a difference in shots, with some looking higher res than others and some showing motion artifacts. Crimson pom poms waving in close-ups of the Alabama crowd showed shimmering artifacts that detracted from the realism of the picture. Orlins said the crowd shots were taken from a wireless handheld camera and that at times the left and right eye drifted a few milliseconds out of sync. “It was probably less than a few milliseconds out of sync, but it’s enough for fast movements to look a little off,” he said.

Although some 3D shots looked like less than full HD resolution to us, Burns and Joe Sack, ESPN senior director, said the signal was the “highest possible coming in.” Sack said there are always “a few soft shots during a game because it’s live,” but the signal didn’t go through any compression, he said. The softness was particularly noticeable in contrast with several commercials of ESPN footage for other 3D programming including the Carrier Classic between North Carolina and Michigan State and a snowboarding 3D telecast from the Winter X games, both of which were exceptionally sharp and detailed. Burns said the commercial feed was the same feed as that rolling from the production truck.

Among the standout cameras used for the BCS game was a robotic camera on a 28-foot tower that was developed especially for ESPN, and the 3D SkyCam that roved over the field, supported by cables, which was developed for ESPN earlier this year, Orlins said. The ESPN Technology team rewrote the software code in advance of the game for the virtual first down line to address artifacts that interfered with 3D viewing, Orlins said. We noticed that statistical graphics were integrated well into the 3D picture, unlike earlier sports presentations where the graphics seemed to float uncomfortably on screen. “We do our best to keep the depth slightly in front of the depth of the subject, but it’s human judgment,” Orlins said.

Although previous ESPN 3D telecasts were thin on commercials, the network filled up the empty space during the BCS Championship with 3D movie trailers including “Underworld Awakening,” “Lost in Our World” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” along with a few Sony commercials and ESPN 3D footage. “We went to the studios and said it was the biggest game of the year, so let’s use this the way it should be used,” Burns said. Having 3D commercials “makes the show look much better,” he said. Several NCAA commercials were even in 3D. “Apparently some of the leagues and conferences are saying, ‘Ok, I'm going to shoot some [3D],’ Burns said. “Good for them."

Burns repeated the network’s standing line that the 3D telecast was “available to 60 million households” but said ESPN has no way of knowing how many 3D viewers actually tuned in. “It was the same thing for HD,” he told us. “We didn’t know for 4-5 years because nobody was counting.” Some affiliates have the technological capability to count 3D viewers but others don’t, he said, “so we don’t know.”