Top-tier graphics without a top-tier budget
We're on a mission to make sports graphics look great on every budget and on every platform. The same match now goes out in several countries, as vertical and square clips on social, and to screens that show HDR next to screens that don't. The biggest events make graphics for each of them, with budgets to match. Most productions can't, so they make one set and crop, rebuild or skip the rest.
Commentary has gone multilingual. Graphics mostly haven't, because every extra version needs its own graphics engine and output, and often its own operator. At the top it happens: for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, 24 versions of every match were produced for DAZN "to meet DAZN's sponsorship and language requirements" (SVG). Below that level, most productions send one set of graphics, usually in English.
Our engine runs every language at the same time, from one package and one operator, each version with its own sponsor. For a rights holder, that is more to sell from the same production.
Cropping a 16:9 graphic to 9:16 doesn't work: a results table runs off both edges, and the bottom of the frame belongs to the platform's captions and buttons. Where vertical is done well, it gets graphics of its own: the ICC produced a vertical feed of every match of the 2023 Cricket World Cup, with graphics "tailored to fit the vertical format" (SVG Europe).
In our packages each shape has its own layout, designed for its frame and taking the same data, for live or for the clips cut from it.
Live sport has been made in HDR for years, but its graphics are almost always designed in SDR and converted. We found no public example of live graphics designed to use HDR's wider colour. Used sparingly, a little HDR in the right place lets graphics match the picture they sit on, on TVs and on the phones that now show HDR.
The engine runs packages designed natively in HDR and makes the SDR versions from the same master. Try the blind test, and read what has been done and how to approach it.
On a cloud GPU. The number that matters is how many complete versions one machine runs live, measured with our heaviest graphic, a moving 3D results table, in five-minute worst-case runs:
Each version is the whole chain at 1080p59.94: the graphic rendered as RGBA with straight alpha (8-bit), composited over the live programme, and that version's programme encoded to H.264 at 10 Mb/s for low-latency delivery over SRT. The incoming programme is decoded once and shared. In HDR (16-bit RGBA graphics, 10-bit HEVC out) the L4 runs three versions instead of four. These are worst-case runs, so for a live show we leave a margin.
It plugs into what productions already use: graphics with their key over NDI, into the vision mixer; the finished programme over SRT; and, for software productions, fill and key in the format of the Media eXchange Layer (MXL).
Beyond the world feed, do you see regional versions, social shapes and HDR as valuable additions, or as nice-to-haves? We would like to hear your view.
And if you'd like to see what this could do for your production, get in touch: info@arbutusmedia.tv