EVS Overcam system expands storytelling toolset; earns IABM award

The EVS stand at IBC saw a steady stream of sports production professionals stop by to see the latest and greatest products from the company. And with artificial intelligence driving automated production systems like Overcam, the company is expanding its presence within the production chain.

The EVS Overcam system took home an IABM award at the 2019 IBC show.

“Overcam is consistent with our strategy of enhancing storytelling,” says Nicolas Bourdon, EVS, SVP, marketing, of the system that couples robotic cameras with AI and smart tracking to automate camera coverage and frame the ball and players properly. The VIA Mind AI engine is proprietary and does not rely on third-party cloud services in order to improve response time (Overcam also won the IABM BaM award in the “Create” category at IBC).

“We can give an additional camera at a budget and cost that [is attractive] and it can also integrate with replay servers and also advanced capabilities like playlist management and automated highlights,” says Bourdon. “A combination of those AI solutions can give those with limited budget a quality production.”

Sebastian Verlaine, EVS, marketing and communications manager, says the Overcam system works by taking an unmanned camera (typically a pan-tilt-zoom camera) and then tracking the player movement and the ball, cost effectively adding extra camera angles to a show.

“The operator can also override it and take control of certain cameras and manually focus on something specific,” adds Verlaine. “And the realtime processing means it can integrate with manned cameras so it can even apply to higher-end productions that want to add camera angles. And it uses our EVS neural network for its algorithms and is responsive because it doesn’t use cloud services.”

Overcam was born out of the EVS Xeebra instant replay system and is a complement to the X-One unified live production system.

“The X-One also has some new features, including multi-angle clipping with in and out points; automatic highlight creation; and then replay speed which can be adjusted,” says Verlaine.

Virtualisation was one of the big themes at IBC and EVS continues to virtualise the back-end infrastructure systems like IPDirector, XTAccess, other EVS applications and even third-party applications via the PMZ virtualisation processing appliance. Look for the next generation of XS-Neo, a software-based studio server, to take another step forward in virtualisation at NAB 2020 next April.