The Ryder Cup in live 3D

As the Ryder Cup nears its competitive conclusion, history has already been made in the sense that this was the first time the competition has been broadcast in live 3D. BSkyB chose Sony Professional partner Telegenic to produce the event and the logistics were challenging, to say the least.
This is the first time that both Telegenic 3D Outside Broadcast (OB) trucks were used together. The T18 OB truck was used for production, camera engineering, sound and slow motion replays, while the T19 OB truck focused on convergence and 3D engineering.
Mark Grinyer, 3D Sports Solutions business head, Sony Professional said, “The Ryder Cup production has created a whole set of new challenges for us, unlike football where the cameras are fixed, a lot more rigs are needed in order to cover vast amounts of ground. The HDFA-200 optical fibre adaptor enabled us to build a solution of this scale that otherwise would not have been possible.”
With the vast amount of equipment being used across a 32km course utilising both fixed and moving cameras, HDFA-200 optical fibre transmission adapters had to be built. The fibre combiners, which enable a pair of 3D cameras to work down a single fibre, reduced the amount of fibre required for the 32km course, as well as speeding up the rigging process; such that each camera set up needed only a single cable to deliver the 3D content. And you thought it was all down to the funny glasses.