Fox Sports will reprise its full suite of cameras for the World Series, from drones to dirt cams, while growing its use of augmented reality graphics to help visualize the game for viewers.
“We’ve really got things covered from the sky to the ground,” said Mike Davies, Fox Sports EVP/Technical & Field Operations, noting that the popular ump cam will also return.
New this year — including Game 1 tonight in Milwaukee — are the placements of two Nucleus 4K cameras along each base line. Those views, coupled with MLB Statcast data and visualization tech from Bolt6 and Virtual Eye, will provide augmented reality visualizations to better illustrate swing and pitch trajectories. Fox analyst John Smoltz, a Baseball HOFer, will have a new tool to discuss strategy.
“What they’re going to be used for is being able to track the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the glove,” Davies said, “and from there, [MLB] comes in and they’re able to do lines and tracings on these balls so that once overlaid, you can see the different release points, different paths to the ball, different things like that.”
There will also be an 8K camera from Nucleus used as the classic “high home” camera placed on an upper level behind home plate to cover the whole field. That can be particularly helpful when tracking an outfielder chasing the ball and runners circling the bases simultaneously. Nucleus’ core competency, Davies described, is making “high-speed, high-resolution cameras in small packages” — and it provided the “doink cam” vantage point in prior Super Bowls.
The high-definition shot from the lens allows for what Davies called “revisionist camera work,” with the ability to capture a wide shot and still have the image fidelity to zoom in on a portion as if a savvy camera operator had anticipated it. And, truth be told, he added, the continuity of the production team is Fox’s biggest asset of all.
“In terms of how baseball works, the crew is a lot more important than the equipment they use,” Davies said. “Matt Gangl, who directs the show now, knows how to tell a baseball story, and he knows how to pick the people who can do it for him.”