At the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the people were thanked, in addition to the opening ceremony director "Zhang emo", that is, the 4K high-definition camera system "Cheetah".
Especially after Chinese short-track speed skater Ren Ziwei won the gold medal in the men's 1000 meters, the "cheetah" erected in the "ice ribbon" of the National Speed Skating Hall is considered to be a big contributor to making fouls invisible. However, CCTV, which built the cheetah system, soon came out to refute the rumors:
1. "Cheetah" is not a referee system, but is specially used for the broadcast of the speed skating events of the Winter Olympics, that is to say, it is specially for our audience.
2. The "Han Jian Shuo" camera, which was ridiculed by netizens, captured the foul action in the short track speed skating men's 1000 meters final on February 7, which was actually the "Flying Cat" system located in the Capital Gymnasium, consisting of an array of 40 4K ultra-high-definition cameras plus 3 8K VR cameras, which can assist in the sentencing in addition to broadcasting.
3. The referee system that really serves the judgment of the game is a set of special cameras independently set up in key shooting locations to capture the movements of athletes, and the picture of this system is not the live broadcast screen we see on TV.
The "cheetah", which is thanked by the whole people, although it has nothing to do with the result of the penalty, but with a high-speed and flexible posture, it captures wonderful pictures in real time, helping the Beijing Winter Olympics to become the highest-rated Winter Olympics in history.
At the daily regular press conference of the Beijing Winter Olympics held not long ago, OBS CEO Ianis Exacos revealed that the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics is the first time that UHD and HDR technology, that is, ultra-high definition and high dynamic range 4K technology, are used for broadcasting and production at the Winter Olympics. On the fourth day of the tournament, there were already more than 6,000 hours of content, including the game itself, as well as interviews with athletes after each game, media reports from different platforms, etc., creating a new record in the broadcast history of the Winter Olympics.
From this point of view, whether it is a "cheetah" or a "flying cat", it is very thankful.
However, just as high-speed cameras can capture things that are invisible to the naked eye, the high-speed camera system that highly restores the moment of the game is actually a large-scale comprehensive technology project, and there are a lot of little-known technological innovations behind it.
The best of the Winter Olympics under high-speed cameras
As early as 2021, the "Cheetah" system has begun to be applied and has been recognized by the International Olympic Committee Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). This Winter Olympics can write a new record in the length of broadcast and the way of content production, and high-speed cameras are obviously indispensable.
As a device capable of capturing moving images at an exposure of less than 1/1000 second or a frame rate of more than 250 frames per second, a High Speed Camera can provide an "ultra-slow motion" viewing experience when the images stored on the medium are projected at regular speed after recording because of the high framing rate.
High-speed cameras capture footage of fighter jets breaking the sound barrier
Once it came out, it received a lot of attention, and it is actually not uncommon in daily life, such as speed measurement on the highway, observation of impact tests in automobile manufacturing, shooting animation special effects, and so on...
Since it is widely used, why is the high-speed camera so eye-catching in this Winter Olympics?
For example, in the speed skating competition of the Winter Olympics, the speed of top athletes can reach nearly 19.5 meters per second, if you use your usual mobile phone or micro single to shoot the picture of the roaring, it is likely that there will only be a large blurry color block in the end. The high-speed camera can sample the fast-moving target multiple times in a very short time, so that the audience can see the wonderful picture in real time and clearly, which is difficult to capture with the naked eye.
The "Cheetah" system allows high-speed cameras to run at a speed of 25 meters per second on a 360-meter-long U-shaped track, and follow the ice and snow sports in real time, bringing a better viewing experience.
One thing to say is that in the more than 100 years since the first modern Olympic Games, photography technology has been closely linked to sports events. At the 1900 Olympic Games in Paris, a new technology of chronography was used, which could shoot several frames of pictures and analyze the movements of athletes. By 1952, the slit camera used in the track and field timing system had a resolution of 1/100th of a second.
In addition to the continuous advancement of pixels, the functions of photographic equipment have also become more diverse, such as cinematographer Garrett Brown invented "the first vertically descending camera system" to shoot 53 feet underwater in order to allow audiences to see information about water sports, and made its debut at the 1996 Olympic Games. In the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, the Hawk-Eye system was used to track the trajectory of the ball, allowing the referee to quickly and accurately determine whether the ball was on or off the field. At the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Intel introduced a new computer tracking system for athletics competitions, and also provided VR viewing of several events through the True VR camera in 8K definition.
It can be said that the Olympic Games themselves are also a competition ground for photography technology. During the Beijing Winter Olympics, the reason why high-speed cameras can make the public proud is because of the technological innovation ability they have shown:
1. Clearer.
In the past, the use of high-speed cameras, such as highways, scientific experiments, etc., often used low-resolution camera snapshots, rather than high-definition cameras, and the playback picture was inevitably a little blurry. Most of the broadcast screens of the Beijing Winter Olympics are 4K ultra-high-definition picture quality.
The full name of "Cheetah" is "ultra-high-speed 4K orbital camera system", the technical standard is 25 meters per second, equivalent to 90 kilometers per hour, running on a 360-meter-long U-shaped track, closely tracking athletes, clearly shooting the athletes' every move, high-definition picture quality makes the broadcast effect more impactful and immersive. This is also the first time in history that the Olympic Games have been fully 4K signal production and live broadcasting.
In addition, 8K, as a future TV broadcast standard, was also introduced in some important competitions at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
2. More real-time.
"Come, let's see how the Korean team fell?" On February 5, the Beijing Winter Olympics short track speed skating mixed team relay final has ended, commentator Wang Meng just finished saying this sentence, the next second on the TV appeared in the high-definition replay of the event screen.
A more immediate viewing experience is also a special experience of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
At last year's Tokyo Olympics, the regular basketball game at The Saitama Super Arena in Japan also used a bullet time technology system shot by high-speed cameras to provide a 360-degree view and a rotating view through 38 cameras. But this technology is limited to replays and cannot yet be used for live streaming.
At the Beijing Winter Olympics, thanks to the stability of the camera system and the support of 5G technology, massive high-definition video data can be processed and output in real time, so as to bring the 360-degree view of the picture to the audience in real time.
3. Smarter.
As the most technologically advanced Winter Olympic Games to date, the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games also help athletes, referees and others reduce the difficulty of operation through smarter camera systems.
In a pleasing figure skating event, because of the complexity of the movements, it is often difficult for lay spectators to fully understand what is happening, and it is also a test of the professional ability of the commentators. We see that on the figure skating field, a network of motion sensors and cameras are deployed around the ice surface, which can provide detailed analysis of the height, distance and complexity of jumps, in addition to helping athletes better analyze competitive strategies and optimize movements, but also provide more comprehensive information for spectators while reducing the pressure on referees.
In the Zhangjiakou sub-region, the Beijing Winter Olympics also absorbed the problem of alpine skiing shooting at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the "high-speed sports target tracking shooting system" developed by Beijing Institute of Technology can record the alpine skiing process at a speed of up to 170 kilometers per hour through high-speed cameras; and the automatic tracking system quickly locks the athletes in the taxi and reduces the difficulty of manual shooting; through the matrix composed of multiple cameras, the whole process of mobilizing from the top of the mountain can be photographed, even if it is inaccessible. The movement in the harsh shooting environment can also be brilliantly presented to the audience.
The continuous innovation of photography technology has changed the content, way and effect of winter ice and snow sports, which naturally makes the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics particularly eye-catching.
The chain of technology behind the camera
Of course, new technologies always come with new challenges. As a result, high-speed camera systems and other camera technologies can work successfully and brilliantly, changing the stage of the Olympic Games, requiring strong teamwork.
A complete set of high-speed imaging system is a chain of technology strung together:
1. Terminal equipment.
High-speed cameras must capture the instantaneous dynamic process that is not clear to the human eye, keep up with fast and unpredictable objects, and be able to play a stable role in complex outdoor lighting environments, which is very demanding on optical equipment. Resolution, sensitivity, component size, etc., all have a greater impact on performance.
Although high-speed cameras do not "snap necks" like lithography machines, they have certain requirements for the production environment and the accuracy of production line equipment. Europe, the United States and Japan started earlier, the accumulation of technology is higher, at present, the world's leading high-speed camera companies are mainly concentrated in the United States, Japan and Europe. According to the "2021 Global and China High-speed Camera Industry In-depth Research Report", the leading companies include Vision Research, Integrated Design Tools, Monitoring Technology in the United States, Photon and NAC in Japan, PCO AG in Germany, Mikrotron GmbH in Germany, and AOS Technologies in Switzerland.
CCTV's independent research and development of "cheetah" has become popular, and with the expansion of the scale of daily applications, it may drive the continuous upgrading of China's high-speed camera industry chain.
At Major League Baseball Stadium, crews are installing weatherproof enclosures for high-speed cameras
2. Storage system.
Ultra-high-definition high-speed cameras mean that high-resolution images are constantly generated, and the files produced are larger, so the amount of data is also amazing. In particular, the Olympic venues are also spread across multiple competition areas, which require real-time transmission of off-site data.
The storage system partners for the Beijing Winter Olympics are not currently known, but the Tokyo Olympics used the Dell DELL EMC PowerScale series, which uniformly and remotely stores petabytes of data generated by two NBC production sites in Japan on a file system in the United States.
3. Real-time broadcasting.
When the cheetah is running, it will start and stop, accelerate and decelerate at any time according to the rhythm of the game, and the power load generated will fluctuate in real time, and it cannot strike because of the shortage of electricity. Therefore, during the Winter Olympics, in order to ensure that the "cheetah" works at its maximum capacity, the power security team has also specially installed a special transformer for it, which can adapt to the sudden change in the electricity load, and at the same time equipped with a backup power supply to ensure high reliability of power supply.
The picture taken by the "Cheetah" also benefits from the extensive coverage of the 5G network, realizing ultra-low latency live broadcast and connection at home and abroad. According to the beijing Winter Olympics partner China Unicom team, on the basis of the traditional 5G network, the Winter Olympic venues also introduced new features such as 200M carrier aggregation, super uplink, and network slicing to provide a better 5G network experience.
At the daily regular press conference of the Winter Olympic Games, Ioannis Exacos, CEO of the Olympic broadcasting company OBS, also attributed the record-breaking results of the Winter Olympic broadcast to China's leading 5G technology.
At the same time, as the first time in the history of the Olympic Games to achieve full cloud, the Beijing Winter Olympics also turned a sports entertainment program that relies on a large number of productions into countless short and diverse programs that can be easily produced on the cloud, which people can freely watch anytime, anywhere.
Through the remote production of content in the cloud and timely transmission, many journalists do not need to go to the event venue to produce and produce event-related content, adapting to the preferences of users on different platforms. This also allows many overseas viewers to receive the wonderful content of the event in a timely manner through YouTube and Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram and other platforms. Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, believes that given the hundreds of millions of views on digital platforms, the Beijing Winter Olympics will eventually become one of the most watched video events in U.S. history. Coupled with a widespread interest in China, the Beijing Olympics could become the most watched video program in world history.
4. Software analysis.
In addition to real-time event broadcasting, most of the video captured by high-speed cameras is uploaded to the server, and specific software is used to analyze and process, serving a variety of different application scenarios.
During the game, in the past, penalties were mainly based on the referee's artificial subjective consciousness, and there were omissions/misreadings, etc. Through the intelligent action visual tracking evaluation system, the referee can provide the necessary motion capture, evaluation and standards to determine whether the action complies with the competition rules. During the Winter Olympics, multi-channel high-definition cameras were deployed in the Cube arena, and the "curling motion trajectory capture" technology was introduced to monitor and capture the curling trajectory in real time, and projected onto the large screen in the field through rendering.
In daily training, these event video big data can also be used to continuously improve athlete training and improve competition performance. One of the common motion analysis systems is a video system (VID) based on multiple semi-automatic high-definition cameras, which records the details of the athletes' actions that are difficult to detect during training, and then assists the analysis through intelligent image processing technology.
During the Winter Olympics, the "3D + AI" technology was used to reconstruct and virtually restore the Shougang Big Jump in 1:1, and at the same time, the video was summarized and extracted by AI, and the processing was quickly summarized, so that the audience could easily and immersively understand the game.
In the past, the way people perceived high-speed cameras was more likely to be when paying tickets for speeding. This Winter Olympics may be a high-speed camera in entertainment media, sports and other fields, closer to the public. From industrial application to public vision, the fairer, more secure and more exciting viewing experience brought by high-speed cameras is not a microcosm of China's technology industry.
From hardware equipment, transmission pipelines, and then to software systems, technological breakthroughs in each link and the valor of every related industry have jointly supported a different and high-standard Olympic Games.
Behind the sports competition, there is an equally fierce and wonderful all-round scientific and technological competition.