It might surprise you to learn that Dartfish, so well-known in the fields of instruction and coaching, started its life as an invention for television. Simulcam proved itself as such an invaluable way for broadcasters to illustrate where alpine skiers made and lost ground that the Austrian national ski team bought it. Thus began the development of our Dartfish software and the rest is…
Well… not history, because those roots continued into a branch of Dartfish which reaches to the present day. The technology, for which we won an Emmy award in 2005, is still in use by many, many broadcasters and production companies around the world. You’ll have seen it if you watch winter sports, taekwondo, motorsport, athletics, baseball, diving… or any Olympics since Sydney 2000. The list of sports and events is impressive.
Dartfish has brought to the broadcast community the stunning SimulCam™ and StroMotion™ special effects. Those technologies are patented worldwide and are therefore exclusively available in Dartfish products or through services delivered by Dartfish or licensed partners.
SimulCam™
This unique patented video technology superimposes one athletic movement over another for precise comparison.
SimulCam™ is based on the idea that whenever two athletes are competing at different times, but over the same terrain, their filmed performances can be composited into a single video showing both competitors seemingly competing together. To create SimulCam™ pictures, Dartfish computes and compensates for differences in camera angle (pan, tilt, zoom) between the two recorded performances and blends them creating a new high quality video showing the relative position, speed, posture and trajectory of competitors. It illustrates what one 10th of a second’s difference can mean in competition. Its added value for television retransmission of sport events has been acclaimed by experts in a large set of sports ranging from technical disciplines for style comparison to pure speed sports for time difference visualization.
StroMotion™
StroMotion™ reveals the evolution of a ball’s movement, or an athlete’s technique, execution and tactics over space and time in an immediate, intuitive fashion. An athletic movement is unfolded in time and space by compounding video images into a frame-by-frame sequence. The StroMotion™ concept is based on stroboscoping, a means to analyze rapid movement so that a moving object is perceived as a series of static images along the object’s trajectory.
Different rendering modalities allow StroMotion™ video sequences to be displayed either in a manner that scrolls over a complete panoramic image or in an animated version where the spectator sees the movement unfold in the original video footage. Further possibilities are illustrated below and even more, from a variety of sports can be found here.
Your technology or “at your service!”
DartStudio™ is MS Windows software which enhances both live feeds or recorded footage using unique image-based camera motion tracking technology that eliminates the need for camera instrumentation. For the broadcaster, it means that the deployment is extremely simple and cost-effective. The results are available within minutes after the original action takes place so that the enhanced images are available for live transmission.
In addition to unique special effects such as SimulCam or Stromotion, DartStudio offers a range of standard video editing functionalities, such as SDI video signal ingestion and playback; synchronous playback in split-screen of up to four video streams; on-video drawings with the support for a large set of customizable shapes, patterns and text; on-video drawings with object tracking capabilities; picture-in-picture with tracking capabilities.
Broadcasters, production companies or sports websites who desire maximum flexibility buy the technology. We’ll train you to get the most from it, or you can buy our expertise; our team of Worldwide partners have had years of experience of integrating themselves into production teams to bring the world a view of sport that only Dartfish can provide.
