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Heather McLean of SVG Europe recently interviewed Adam Robbins, NEP UK senior broadcast engineer about a trial at the Wimbledon Championships 2021 using Hitomi’s MatchBox Glass lip sync app to reduce the need for pen and paper calculations to synchronise audio and video.

“The problem is that on Wimbledon, we’ve got various different courts using different mixing technologies and different camera technologies, different super slows, different UHD, radio cameras, different ways of getting the cameras back to us; all kinds of stuff. The same way with sound. By the time all this comes back to us, none of it lines up anymore."

The trial with MatchBox Glass at Wimbledon involved an interview using a radio camera and a line camera with a radio microphone that was coming to NEP via the host broadcaster’s IT networks.

“With the new phone app [from Hitomi], you just hold the phone in front of the camera and put the microphone near it, and then it just comes out with, “this is the path delay, literal, beginning to end. There are no arguments. It is 42 milliseconds [delay]. Let’s fix it now.”” stated Robbins

He added, “Normally I see so many different pieces of scraps of paper with cameras and cables coming out them in different drawings and people have written what they think; all the delays, and it’s like, “that’s brilliant, but you’ve forgotten that,” whereas with [Glass] there’s no arguing about it. Rather than people watching clapper boards, slowing the clapper boards down in an EVS machine to try and get it exactly right, [Glass] removes the subjectivity involved and gives a quantitative measurement of any delays that can be relied on."

Robbins confirmed the trial was encouraging and that NEP UK will be using the technology again at future sporting events.

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