Broadcast graphics for fencing

I created a TV graphics package for fencing tournaments.

Earlier this year, Christchurch played host to the Commonwealth Junior & Cadet fencing tournament.

Selected parts of the tournament were livestreamed, with a package broadcast on Sky TV (NZ). The broadcast and finals streams had a live graphics package fed from the scoreboard.

The programmes were produced using a broadcast-spec OB truck supplied by Kiwi Outside Broadcast. The truck graphics PC used Captivate to generate its graphics, which output as key+fill SDI signals. These were fed to the vision mixer and keyed onto the picture in the usual way.

The package can be seen in action on the Commonwealth Junior & Cadet 2024 programmes.

The details read from the scoreboard cover the “hit” lamps, scores, clock (including fractional seconds in the last 10s), period, red/yellow cards, and the priority indicator. On top of that, the package provides a place to enter the fencer names and nationalities, and set colours for them.

This is all made possible by the scoreboard, a Favero FA-07, offering a data feed over an RS-422 interface. I wrote a Python script to parse the data feed, turn it into a JSON dictionary and pass on to Captivate.