No retries
Taiwan was just as caught up in the recent fever for the World Cup and 3D as anyone else. Elta TV, which is carried on Chunghwa Telecom's MOD system, was the only local broadcaster to acquire the television rights to the 3D World Cup.
Established in 2008, Elta currently broadcasts three channels: sports, stage and screen, and variety. It is one of Taiwan's few "Full HD" networks (i.e. all its programming is high-definition 1920 x 1080-resolution programming). By broadcasting the 3D World Cup, Elta further solidified its image as a network on the cutting edge of display technology.
Peter Cheng, Elta's vice president, notes that the 3D World Cup was difficult to broadcast. Though 3D imaging has been around for more than 100 years, the World Cup marked the first attempt to air 3D live. Everything about it, from shooting the match to sending the feed to broadcasting the match, was hard.
"Live broadcasts differ from 3D films in significant ways," he explains. "When making a film, you can retake a bad shot. And if you can't reshoot it, you can use computers to fix it in post-production. The live broadcast was simulcast around the world. There was just no way to fix any mistakes."
Cheng says that to capture the excitement in the stadium, Sony's team installed seven 3D rigs, each consisting of a pair of high-definition cameras, in each of the stadiums-one rig by each goal, one covering the area between the midfield line and the goal on each side, one in the upper reaches of the stands, and two in the corners.
With this setup, the Sony team could take aerial shots, close-ups, and overviews, as well as cover the goals, ensuring it wouldn't miss any of the action. And when the team replayed the action in slow motion, they had multiple camera angles to work with.
Even so, you can't script a match and when you're working with a 7,140-square-meter football pitch, you never know from one second to the next where the ball is going to be. With this in mind, the team set their cameras' projection plane at the edge of the pitch for the World Cup.
This setup meant that whether the action was at the near or far edge of the pitch, virtually all of the images had a negative parallax. This prevented rapid switching between negative and positive parallax images, something that can make viewers dizzy and nauseous.
In the normal course of events, a 90-minute match will see a couple of breathtaking goals. The team shot the matches in such a way that goal shots were among the few positive parallax images, and the suddenness of the switch helped heighten viewer excitement.
Elta TV, which broadcast the first 3D World Cup to local viewers, currently has three channels: sports, stage and screen, and variety. The network is one of very few in Taiwan able to broadcast entirely in Full HD.