Serena Williams bowed out of the U.S. Open in the semi-final round on a foot fault, one of the few calls in modern sports that is not subject to replay. And broadcast television is not in the habit of dedicating a camera to solely covering a player’s feet, so CBS did not have a definitive answer as to whether the call was good, either.
“Nobody in the world is going to commit a camera to feet the whole time,” says CBS Sports director Bob Fishman. “That would be ridiculous.”
The Hawk-Eye instant replay system is designed to track only the movement of the ball, and not the feet of a player (at least not yet), so that was no help in confirming or denying the call – but the antiquated MacCam system would have been.
“The old MacCam was set up down the lines, so we would have had a close-up to judge if it was a horribly bad call, or if she did in fact foot-fault,” Fishman explains. “Sometimes in those moments, the old technology could have given us the definitive angle.”
The SwingVision technology, however, is a different story. Using high-speed cameras to capture up to 40,000 frames per second, SwingVision offers stunning shots that other camera systems simply cannot produce.
“It’s a tremendous camera and system,” Fishman says. “Because it’s shooting at such high speed, you must have an incredible amount of light, which is why it’s not as good at night. Because the replays are showed so much slower to get the impact of the image, you just have to be careful about the timing, but we generally use those shots at the end of a game, rather than between points, because you can get caught on that.”
