Sky Sports today announced that it has chosen Vizrt as the core graphics platform for its 3DTV channel, due to launch in April.
Darren Long, Sky Sports’ Director of Operations described his reasons for the decision, “We have worked with Vizrt for more than ten years. They have supported us with excellent graphics for our SD sports coverage, then later for HD and now they will do so again for 3D. Vizrt has always been a real-time 3D system and this meant it was easy for our designers to convert Sky Sports’ current HD designs to their stereo 3D equivalents. The results are stunning and the graphics drew special attention from viewers when we recently ran our world’s first stereo 3D football match trial. I am sure that Vizrt’s graphics will enhance our new 3D channel, just as they do for all our other channels.”
The stereoscopic Vizrt system uses a Viz Trio CG operator interface, controlling a Viz render engine PC. This powerful graphics engine uses two graphics cards and the separately rendered HD channels for each eye are synchronised by a new application developed for the process. The stereoscopic convergence point and depth are also adjustable on the fly to allow for changing camera views. The system can also be driven by GPI triggers from the vision-mixing desk.
Vizrt UK’s Managing Director, Rex Jenkins added, “Sky Sports demands the highest quality from its graphics systems and we are glad to meet their needs. This prestigious project attracted a lot of competition from all over the world so it is especially satisfying to find that Vizrt came out on top. We had a special advantage because Vizrt has always delivered graphics as true 3D animations, so adding stereoscopy to the rendering process was less of a challenge for us than it must have been for other systems. In that sense, Sky Sports backed the right horse ten years ago when it chose to use Vizrt for the first time.”