Finnish national broadcaster Yle chose RT Software's Tactic telestrator, with AI/ML features and record-to-disk functionality, to handle the country’s Euro 2024 football coverage.
Finnish national broadcaster Yle chose RT Software's Tactic telestrator to handle the country’s Euro 2024 football coverage. Included in YLE's investment are Tactic Pro's AI features, developed to accelerate the creation of video sequences. For assisted keyframing, Tactic Pro uses machine learning algorithms to detect players and create their motion paths. Users can create complex analysis sequences with multiple tracked players in far less time than they would need to do the work manually.
Users can also save time with Tactic Pro's automated pitch calibration, a necessary step to align graphics to the camera perspective. The algorithms work for football (soccer), American (NFL) and Australian (AFL) pitches. During match analysis, when moving players across the pitch to illustrate tactical positioning, RT’s AI engine cuts out the players by detecting edges and fills in the background, meanwhile recognising white lines on the pitch.
Yle purchased the Euro 2024 League Package with the Tactic software, supplying all of the player names and team strips to help compose their graphics more quickly.
Although the Yle operators were already using an existing replay server, another advantage of selecting Tactic Pro was its built-in record-to-disk function. This feature allows users to work with live feeds without needing an external replay server, keeping the current server ports free for other uses. Tactic’s internal server can be used to record, pause, rewind and simultaneously add graphics. The operator can play the sequence out to air, save it to archive and return to the live feed.
Record-to-disk avoids the cost of extra server channels, but still supports file transfers from the replay server when required. Tactic integrates with most broadcast replay servers, and also work with local or network files users need to access, which means YLE will be able to work with content managed by an asset management system.
Jari Vuorenmaa, Yle's Technical Designer, led the product evaluation and was impressed by the extensive support RT Software made available to their operations team prior to the sale. "It was important to us, when evaluating our move from our old telestration tool to Tactic Pro, that our operators were completely confident in the new product. We were impressed with how RT Software delivered training even before we made our final decision," he said.
"Our operators really appreciated how simple the AI features made their work. The ability to automatically calibrate the pitch and track players with just a few clicks is a fantastic improvement over our current workflow. It allows operators to focus on telling the story of the match rather than spending time setting up the system." www.rtsw.co.uk
