Tech Column

FreeD Is Ready For Its Shot at the Big Stage

Image courtesy of Replay Technologies, Inc.

Move over 3D, meet FreeD, aka Free Dimensional Video. Technology, as we’ve discovered, never stands still, and so it is that FreeD from Replay Technologies is carving out a new niche in live sports broadcasting, catering to the fans in the stadium and at home simultaneously. It’s a start-up backed by a $9 million investment from Guggenheim Partners this year and just picked up Samsung as a partner last June.

For show directors it means if you didn’t like the angle on the play or it was obscured, just pull up FreeD and circle around until you get the angle you want and hit play. Think of the stop motion, 360-degree camera scenes in the movie Matrix but in real time at live sports events.

FreeD is a computer-driven technology that fabricates a 360-degree “interlaced” extension of a shot by recreating pixels drawn from a myriad of cameras. Just as 1080i is an artificial resolution made up of interlaced, duplicated pixels from a 720-pixel image, FreeD’s algorithm takes the existing images in their entirety and duplicates them, slightly changing the angle of view infinitely multiple times to create a 360-degree view.

This is not tomorrow’s technology; it debuted at the 2012 London Olympics and is installed at venues like Yankee Stadium, where it won a New York Emmy Award in “Technical Achievement” on the YES Network; at the LA Dodger’s stadium; the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, and soon will expand to other venues in sports like tennis and soccer.

For the viewer, the value add is the ability to map a play from almost any angle, following the arc of the ball, the pass or the shot as if they were a drone. It’s a step beyond a FlyCam and the current apex of immersive technology.

As every DP knows, the camera sees only what it sees, and in live action sports there’s a myriad of things that could block the money shot. It’s not like a feature film set or even a TV show where almost every detail in the frame is controlled, and even then, there is always the possibility of a retake.

The technical details and data management process is astounding. Depending on the sport, there are up to 30 or 32 JAI SP-20000-PMCL, 20-megapixel CMOS cameras each giving a 5K image (5120 x 3840) at 30 to 50 fps capture set up around the field of play.

Each of those cameras is fitted with an F-mount prime lens. The focal length of each lens varies depending on the position of the camera, with the preferred installation pointing slightly down. None of the data is manipulated in-camera, instead it’s all channeled via fibre optic cable, each source feeding its own server with a back-up server with a crew from Replay at the event and watching and assisting from Tel Aviv, Israel, in real time. Because of the size and complexity, it’s not a mobile system, and a permanent installation is required, making it viable only for Tier One sports events.

“At Dodger stadium we ran something like 4 km of fibre for the installation,” said Eric Finney, executive vice president, business development, sales and communication at Replay Technologies based in the Washington, D.C., area.

The tsunami of data is so overpowering that the system can only capture about 30 seconds of action at a time, constantly dumping out older data to be overwritten with fresh data. If there’s a pivotal play, a “pilot” flags the TV broadcast crew to discern interest then the “navigator” moves the data to a separate server while the game continues. That separated data is then processed to deliver the remarkable FreeD replay cropped down to a broadcast friendly size of 1920 by 1080 from the original 5K.

“The guys who invented all this and wrote the algorithm are actually based in Tel Aviv, which is the company