Im in Moscow working for Whitlight in-turn working for ITV on the Russian world cup, I’m looking after d3 (disguise) content to screens in the studio where we are based int he middle of Red Square. We’ve been here for just over 2 weeks and tomorrow and are here for another 4 weeks.
Its been such a long time in posting, I’ve been wanting to do an update post and catch up on the past year but the sear amount to cover is pretty daunting, its been a busy 12 month. Instead of trying to catch up here is what I’m up to now, we have a medium size studio with a view out onto red square and LED screens either side. In addition we have another LED screen which can be brought in and out which covers the window giving us the ability to fake that the studio is in the stadium, below is a shot taken of d3 my TX monitor.
I have a brilliant little snug in the studio which looks small from the outside but is the ideal amount of space and also out of the way so you don’t end up with people putting shit on your desk.
This isn’t just any studio, this is an augmented reality studio on a couple of levels, the side LED screens serve a couple of purpose. The either have a background and a graphic on framing the presenters, or they are relaying the feed from 2 cameras behind the led looking out of the window. The camera relay serves to extend the view out of the window using the LED as “fake windows”, to help wit this effect the Jib camera is sending out traking data using the Stype system so the camera images are manipulated as the camera moves adding to the effect that the LED really is a window. Below is the only photo I have, I hadn’t really taken many pictures and wasnt intending to blog about this but the words seem to have flowed starting again.
This was in the early stages of image alignment, the fake AR roof is looking pretty good but there was allot more work went into the sides. Its an incredibly difficult task trying to align and manipulate a 2D flat image (the camera view) to a 3d enviromnent like this and get the foreground and background elements of the 2D plate to match. Deltatre are looking after the looking after the tracking and manipulation of the camera images and passing those to d3 and then I’m mapping these to the LED, The Detatre team have done a really good job and the AR & Perspective matching is looking really good now.
I forgot to mention that in addition to the “through the window” perspective tracking, there is also a fake AR dome which is composited on to he final studio shot before going out on TX. The fourth image in this blog shows this pretty well.
Its been a good couple of weeks so far, have a look at this video presented by Andy who championed and made the 2 level AR idea happen in the ITV Sport studio. I’ve written this post in less than 90 minutes whist the match is on. I feel pretty rusty at writing these posts so hopefully they will get better!