Disguise powers throwback 1950s-style live broadcast for FOX Sports baseball game
All Of It Now Uses Disguise GX 3 Server for Black-and-white Retro Visual Effects
Broadcast
In June 2024, baseball watchers were able to step 70 years back in time - thanks to Disguise’s GX 3 media server. With Disguise’s help, Los Angeles-based creative agency All Of It Now teamed up with FOX Sports to broadcast The MLB at Rickwood Field: A Tribute to the Negro Leagues in a black and white, retro format to millions of sports fans around the world.
To mark the 70th anniversary of baseball legend Willie Mays' signature play "The Catch," FOX Sports was looking for a way to simulate live what it would be like to watch a baseball game at home in the 1950s - down to the fixed camera angles, old-time audio, and vintage graphics. Their aim was to broadcast the first half of the fifth inning of a baseball game in this format.
Disguise partner, All of it Now (AOIN), helped create the effects they wanted on screen, quickly and true to the era. Within 24 hours of receiving the brief, AOIN had mocked up their proposal through Disguise’s visual experience software, Designer.
They used Designer to show how they could simulate the broadcast across a series of cues, and how Notch real-time graphic effects would be triggered at the relevant part of the game. The effects needed to be rendered live, right down to the vintage-style titles and scratch effects. This was due to the live nature of the game - with not even bookmakers being able to correctly predict the balls and strikes.
The AOIN team therefore needed a simple ‘plug and play’ option, where one engineer could quickly and seamlessly transition the live feed back to the 1950s. For the broadcast, one engineer was deployed on site to manage the hardware, software, and creative side of the visual effects.
Due to its capabilities to power large-scale, generative content playback, Disguise’s GX 3 media server was the best choice for the broadcast. A reliable server was also crucial in case the effects needed to stop at any point due to an emergency broadcast. The GX3 would allow for a rapid and seamless change back to the standard broadcast without being visually jarring.
If we had used another system than Disguise to send, receive, and send SDI feeds, we would have had to configure the SDI outputs or potentially reconfigure it. Disguise had plug and play settings already there that matched the exact colour space and pipeline we needed to use for the FOX engineering team.
CEO and Founder, AOIN
Augmented Reality (AR) is not often used creatively in sports broadcasting. It usually serves more of a functional purpose, such as showing player statistics or information. So, this project was seen as industry-leading, with a risk that viewers would find the visual effects distracting from the game itself.
The team, however, delivered one of the most well-loved broadcast experiences. Social media comments and feedback was overwhelmingly positive and the press, and broadcast hailed it as a triumph.
Berto Mora added: “Once we had finished the broadcast itself everyone was cheering in the control room. It was like we had just landed on the moon.”