TECH CINEMATIC SPORTS
Broadcast vendors are delivering cine-live tools for sports, says Adrian Pennington, opening up a wealth of creative possibilities & opportunities to get fans closer to the action “Increasingly, the filmic look is part of the match day arsenal”
T his season, Steadicams League football matches, but join players on the pitch for goal celebrations. The move is part of an evolving strategy to provide broadcasters with coverage that gets fans closer to the action, following a growing trend that makes a filmic look part of the matchday arsenal. Cine cams are everywhere. They were featured at the FIFA Club World Cup this summer, included in coverage of the British & Irish Lions’ successful tour carrying cameras with cine-style capabilities will be allowed not just to patrol the touchline of Premier
Down Under and used at Wimbledon. The trend kicked off in the US in 2020, when Fox Sports used an RF system – the Megalodon – to bring viewers cinematic imagery of NFL touchdown celebrations. It also coincided with the rise in popularity of behind-the-scenes sports documentaries like Sunderland ’Til I Die and Formula 1 : Drive to Survive , which elevated the production values of sports content. The primary desirable aesthetic of cine-style imagers is being able to enhance aspects of the story with a visually appealing shallow depth- of-field, although a handy secondary
attribute is the ability to capture dramatic footage at high speed and play it back in slomo during breaks. Not only are they a regular feature of major sports events, but the number of such cameras per event – handheld and transmitted via RF or cabled on tripods – is increasing. A shallow depth-of-field is typically achieved using larger sensors and wider apertures. Where early innovations used mirrorless full-frame prosumer models like the Sony A7 series – retrofitted for live broadcast – recently, manufacturers have developed Super 35 systems that more functionally fit the
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