Genesis by Hormon

My adventure with television started few years ago in 2003. I was yet a student at that time and was just admitted for training in TV station. At first I learned about studios, cameras, cabling, whole bunch of strange looking devices :-) and stuff I never heard of before. Three months has passed and I was asked for a meeting with my boss. He thought I had potential and offered me a job. I was thrilled. “Wow, I’m going to work in television!” I thought. When I think of it now it makes me laugh but back then I was so excited when I put the foot in the control room as fresh… cg operator.

My enthusiasm vanished after first month. Writing text on lower thirds and filling templates wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I’m quite stubborn in what I do so I said to myself – “If I learn more maybe I will be noticed”. Believe me, being noticed in a company which has over 5000 employees isn’t easy. During breaks between different TV programs I started with small things. First I learned about CG I was working on. It was Inscriber LE. I read user manuals, technical reference and all there was to read about it. I found few features that was never used in my company before but turned out to be quite useful. And then I found out about RTX. For those who do not know, RTX is API for writing external applications for Inscriber products. It took me few days to understand basics and I was able to write my first application. I can still remember how happy I was when “Hello world” text appeared on CG preview. From that moment everything started to move faster. Soon I was able to create more sophisticated apps and the hunger to learn more started to grow in me. I must have looked like a real geek spending all my free time learning how to program new features. I think my boss saw that too because after few months he offered me position in newly formed R&D graphics team.

We were doing all kinds of stuff. From creating software, displaying graphics and preparing short clips on EVS LSM machines during live sport events, to developing production technologies of new shows. Finally I was doing something exciting. At first we worked with Inscriber machines – DigiSuite LE/LI, LX, CG2000 and Inca. All those systems had one in common – they were designed to display 2D graphics. Which was ok at that time. But then in 2005 my company bought first vizrt machines for virtual set. When I laid my fingers on one of those I knew it was love at first “touch”.

In spring 2006 my company decided to buy more (about 13) new vizrt machines and prepare “something special” for upcoming Football World Championships in Germany. We came up with following features: interactive scene, virtual graphics in non-blueboxed studio and standard 3D graphics. Since we were running short with time (we had about 4 weeks to prepare everything) and we didn’t have full knowledge needed, company send us on a quick one-week training to Tel Aviv. While we were learning about different aspects of vizrt systems our brand new viz machines were shipped to our TV station. When we came back we had two weeks to deadline.

Alternative way to use touchscreen :-)

The funny thing is – we managed to do everything. Interactive soccer scene was not made by us at that time, but vizrt company kindly provided us one. Virtual graphics scene was prepared to display graphics before guests in studio and on transparent glass plate. EVS systems were all connected and ready for studio guests’ analysis…
we were exhausted :-).

Sport commentators learning how to use touchscreen

This was my first project based on viz machines. Since then I developed quite a few external control applications for this system. And though I know there’s still much for me to learn, I think you won’t mind if I share some tips and tricks with you.