News and Sports television coverage needs real-time video editing
tools. For the 1996 summer Olympics the BBC successfully used
Matrox’s DigiSuite to provide a competitive edge
Early in 1996, the BBC's Post Production and Graphic Design
Department needed to develop a new computer system to create
animated graphics in real time for production clients covering live
news and sports events. A suitable system that could support
multi-user input and provide tight integration of sophisticated
graphics output with a database was not available
off-the-shelf.
The BBC Computer Graphics Workshop, the software development group
within Post Production and Graphic Design, with broad experience of
graphics systems development on a wide range of platforms, turned
to Matrox DigiSuite for a high quality, reliable, cost-effective
broadcast graphics system. The new DigiSuite DTV card combines the
DigiSuite real-time editing engine with support for the complete
range of compression formats, audio and video I/O, and connectivity
interfaces that are important in the era of digital television.In
many facilities, the interface between camcorders, VTRs, and
non-linear editing systems has been analogue or SDI video
regardless of the compression technology used in each individual
device. The ability to exchange compressed video between devices
using a common compression scheme, combined with the ability to
edit in the native compression format, offers two important
benefits: Quality is preserved throughout the production process by
avoiding multiple decompression/compression passes, since equipment
is interoperable at the bitstream level Productivity is increased
by faster than real-time transfers of video material via SDTIThe
Computer Graphics Workshop team worked closely with Matrox to
ensure the functionality they required was designed into the
graphics hardware. With the advantage of the leading-edge
technology on the Matrox DigiMix board, the BBC system was designed
and implemented within a few months. The relatively short
development time and the economical hardware meant considerable
cost savings for the BBC. BBC Sport were the first to use the
Matrox DigiSuite-based system to produce graphic displays at the
1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, USA. BBC and Atlanta Olympic
Games branding was incorporated into the graphic styles used to
display lane orders and results of heats and finals for over twenty
different sports. Using data supplied directly from the Olympics
host computer systems, graphics were generated automatically,
getting them 'on-air' more rapidly, accurately and using fewer
staff than conventional graphics techniques. Following the success
of its use on the broadcast coverage of the Olympic Games, the
DigiSuite-based system was used again by BBC Sport during live
coverage of the Grand National. As well as results of the races,
the system displayed statistics and information on horses and
jockeys from the BBC horse racing database.By the time of the UK
General Election in May 1997, the DigiSuite-based system had proven
itself an obvious choice for live broadcast and was used by BBC
Scotland to report the election results. A graphics system
incorporating three DigiMix boards was used to generate "fullforms"
(complete graphics pages showing the election results), maps and
histograms, and to provide graphics and keys for overlay on live
video. Associated with the multi-output graphics system was a
database, also built by the Computer Graphics Workshop, holding
full candidate and party details. Combining the database
information with vote figures entered as results were declared
enabled the automatic creation of instantaneous graphics to match
the live reports from the outside broadcasts at the counts. After
the election, the producer of the BBC Scotland coverage said, "Our
new graphics system gave our election coverage a great look and was
very easy to use and we will certainly use it on future
events."
Compiled by Will garside