High-Definition Sports Broadcasting Challenges

Joan Cramer uses her 61-inch TV to watch sports on a regular basis. She pays extra to her cable provider for HD channels and the NFL Sunday Ticket football package.

Telecasting a sporting event involves dozens of cameras, production teams, power backups and mobile mixing and editing vans. Those costly investments make it difficult to justify converting to 4K. 안방티비

Picture quality

For sports broadcasts, image quality is critical. High-definition cameras capture the action, then the images are sent to a studio where they’re integrated with commentary sound mixing and graphical insets.

In addition to offering HD video, many of today’s sports networks are also experimenting with 4K (also called UHD) broadcasting. Using uncompressed 4K signals requires much higher bandwidth than HD, so the cost of acquiring and transporting this content can be prohibitive.

In the case of a live event, such as a football game or the Super Bowl, broadcasters typically record in HD and then upconvert to 4K before distributing to their subscribers. This means that to experience a sports broadcast in HDR, you’ll need a TV or streaming device capable of supporting this format. For example, Fox will broadcast this year’s NFL season and the Super Bowl in 1080p with HDR, and will then upconvert those signals to 2160p 60fps for distribution on ESPN+ and DirecTV. ufc 무료 중계

Audio quality

While 4K, HDR and high frame rate technologies can offer viewers more immersive sports viewing experiences, these technologies have unique challenges that must be addressed to be successful. As a company that operates across the entire video production value chain, Technicolor has a bird’s eye view of how these challenges impact the live sports broadcasting ecosystem as a whole.

This is especially true of audio quality. The unspoken guidelines that define good audio quality in general are hard to maintain during real-time sports broadcasts. They include ensuring captions are in sync with the audio and free of errors like spelling mistakes, missing player names, profanity (which may require censorship) and encoding errors such as dropout, jitter and echo.

In addition to these challenges, live sports broadcasts can involve many different audio sources which need to be mixed together. The mix needs to be consistent and have good clarity, without reverberation or background noise. This requires a highly skilled audio engineer to maintain. 고화질 스포츠 중계

Widescreen

The widescreen aspect ratio of HD has allowed sports to be shown with more of the action in a single shot from a closer vantage point. This is particularly useful for live sports, as it allows you to see more of the action and less of the sideline commentary.

However, if you watch a standard definition TV broadcast on an HD television, you will notice black bars at the top and bottom of the image. This is called letterboxing, and it can cause distortion of the image. It’s also possible to stretch the picture horizontally, but this will cut off image information on the left and right sides of the screen.

For now, Fox will capture the Super Bowl in 1080p high-definition with HDR, then upscale it to 4K for broadcast. This is the same approach the network used last year and throughout the NFL playoffs. This is because working in uncompressed 4K requires a much higher data rate than the 1.5 gigabit-per-second signals used for 720p HD and 1080i HD.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

Most people are familiar with HDR through 4K TVs. However, most of the time when you hear about HDR it is connected to UHD/4K resolution, which isn’t really a good indicator since the picture quality improvements are independent of pixel density.

The main improvement of HDR is contrast ratio, and the ability to display much brighter images without a washed out appearance. It also enhances colors by expanding the range that can be displayed, which means you get more vibrant blues, greens and reds.

The best way to experience HDR is with an LED LCD TV that supports it, such as one that uses local dimming zones or QLED. However, you can also watch movies and shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Vudu in HDR if you have a fast enough internet connection. Some of the newest UHD Blu-ray discs and streaming video services like Sony and Microsoft’s PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S support HDR, too.