Re: Digital Method Puts Ad Inside TV

> I think the "breakthrough" happened a lot earlier. I recall watching

>> what I seem to recall to be a Formula 1 race where a tire company logo >> was 'painted' on the pavement, in front of the start line. The logo >> disappeared after the race started. This was at least 3 years ago. > Actually I'd bet it was the yellow first down line used in football > telecasts that started it all. Once a marketing wiz noticed what was > happening they starting coming up with all kinds of things to > superimpose. I'm fairly certain those small ads on the backstop to the > side of the view of the batter in major league base ball games is > superimposed on a specially colored panel. It keeps changing, there > are a LOT of different displays, I can see no lines from rotating > panels, and at times with "special views" the area is blank.

The ads on the backstop -- also at tennis court-side, and other similar places -- have been around for a _long_ time. The technology employed was _commercially_ deployed back in the mid 1960s for U.S. television. known as 'chroma-key', you could use it to drop in a 'replacement' image for anything that was in the scene of a particular color. Usually, the gear was set to trigger on a fairly narrow range of blue. Blue was the commonly-used color because it was not a component of 'flesh tones'.

To make the insert of the replacement image 'believable', the camera that provided the original scene needed to hold a fixed view of that scene. You know "something's funny" when, for example, one part of the image zooms in, while another part _doesn't_.

Note: The original chroma-key technology was pure analog, some early hardware was employing vacuum tubes. It was only a little more complex than the circuitry in the basic 'special effects generator' used for "split-screen" "corner inserts", etc. In fact, it shared most of the circuitry with the special-effects generator.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi
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