AMSTERDAM — Held September 16 from 4:45 to 6:15 p.m., the IBC conference’s Tech Talks series will address developments impacting the production of sports broadcasts, including 3D sound recording and delivery.
Michael Babbitt, Solutions Engineering Director for Dolby Laboratories, will present “Sound and Fury: Bringing Dolby Atmos to the NHRA,” a discussion of Dolby’s collaboration with the NHRA (the National Hot Rod Association) to deliver an object-based surround system for an NHRA race broadcast. Captured and delivered in Dolby Atmos, a recent experimental broadcast was designed to recreate the live race experience for audiences at home.
”Dolby Atmos was always designed to work with lots of different types of content,” explained Babbitt’s colleague, Dolby Senior Production Marketing Manager Rob France, in a recent interview, “but when you come to something like an NHRA race and you hear the cars, you just see that come to life when you mix in Dolby Atmos.”
Renato Pellegrini, AMBEO Project Manager for Sennheiser will present “Object-Audio Capture Systems for Sports Broadcast.” In the Future Zone at this year’s show, Sennheiser and Lawo will demonstrate a new Sennheiser microphone array technology designed for soccer match broadcasts that is able to put a highly directional focus on the relevant sounds on the pitch (for example, ball sounds and referee or player comments). This array is combined with Lawo Kick, software that works with camera tracking to locate the ball and steers the direction of the microphone array.
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”For object-based broadcast formats, it is of paramount importance to obtain clear, clean audio signals without any background noise,” Pellegrini emphasizes. “This microphone array will be able to deliver clear signals with the utmost reduction in background noise, avoiding disturbing high-volume spill that interferes with the desired signal.”