Super Bowl XXXVIII Broadcast
Feb. 02, 2004 -
We’ve seen the Super Bowl broadcast, read the reviews from TV critics and various pundits, and watched the endless commercials, but how was the biggest TV show of the year from a broadcaster’s perspective? How was it from a content creator’s point of view? I’ll try to ignore all the bare-breasted, streaking distractions and give you my review of the CBS broadcast itself, its technical merits and foibles, its quality and lack thereof, its directorial skill, and its new technology.As you probably know, the Super Bowl this year featured the New England Patriots beating the Carolina Panthers by a score of 32-29 in an exciting game that, besides being by far the highest-rated broadcast of the year, turned out to be an unusually exciting contest. Like Christmas morning for broadcasters, the annual epic drew a gigantic audience of more than 140 million viewers, and the real gift to CBS this year was the sky-high $2.3 million tariff the network collected from prestige-hungry advertisers for each thirty-second spot. But we’re not reviewing the spots here – that will come later this week on my editorial on digitalvideoediting.com (read it by clicking here). Let’s take a look at the Super Bowl broadcast by CBS, the 15th time the network has aired the Big Game and its first since 2001, when it broadcast the first HDTV Super Bowl, a game between the Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants.
Watching the game on our state-of-the-art 1080i viewing equipment here in the Midwest Test Facility Theater, the generally well-executed Super Bowl broadcast still showed that we’re in the middle of an awkward time in broadcasting. Although most of the cameras and sources used in the show were full-blown HD, some were not. This was probably not evident to viewers watching in standard definition (SD), but to those watching in HD, the difference between HD and juiced-up, up-rezzed SD was dramatic. I’m sure CBS knows this, but standard definition images look lame next to HD, no matter how you slice them. In fact, many of my few complaints about the broadcast have to do with SD images on an HD broadcast.
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After the umpteen hours of pre-game nonsense, the game started with an excellent compositing idea by CBS. The player introductions consisted of clever shots of groups of players “beaming in” a la Star Trek, then walking toward the camera. Each player was individually composited and placed realistically in a group shot, introducing himself as he stopped walking into his final pose position. It was a highly effective presentation, except for the fact that the players were obviously shot in SD. Composited against an HD background, the effect was anything but clean. Oh, well. I guess the majority of viewers, watching in SD, didn’t notice.
Unlike CBS’s HD coverage of the Super Bowl in Tampa in 2001, where the network produced the broadcast using two separate production systems, HD and SD, the network went with one HD production system, split into SD (cropped for 4x3) and HD feeds. Feeding the graphics to both SD and HD formats was a character generator using Vizrt software inside two SGI Onyx workstations. A single operator sent graphics from one keyboard to both systems, resulting in graphics for the HD feed that looked like they had been specially created for HD. How nice to have the time and scoring information all the way to the left or right of the screen for once, rather than the mid-center of the screen where ABC’s Monday Night Football graphics reside in the HD format.
The slow-motion replays looked generally clean, with CBS using EVS LSM (Live Slow Motion) XT servers that were operating in 1080i resolution for instant playback duties. Making matters easier for both feeds, the EVS was able to output both HD and SD resolutions from each machine. Muddying up the water, however, were CBS’s six “super slo-mo” units, which played back standard definition that looked pretty murky when viewed on a 1080i monitor.
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