Purdue University Dresses Up Sports Replays with Paint Tele-Illustration Tool

In order to enhance the sports game experience, Purdue University needed a solution that could better illustrate game replays – literally.

The university invested in Paint by ChyronHego, a tele-illustration tool that adds customized graphics to recorded game replays.

“Replays have always been very important in a live video board production,” says Stephen Hall, Director of Hall of Music Productions at Purdue. “When you talk about replays, you think, how can I bring a different angle, a different look to the spectator? Not everybody sits in the best seat in the house, so if you can get them from multiple angles, that becomes an important thing.”

A Purdue student works with the tele-illustration tool. Photo by Purdue University.

When replays are shown on the university’s field video boards during a game, Purdue’s production team uses the Paint software to “tell the story” of a play; they can sketch dashed lines to show where a player has run, zoom in on a player to determine if he stepped out of bounds, and draw a circle around a player during a play “Madden style.”

“We can show the play, rewind it, slow it down,” says Scott Horton, Creative Director, Hall of Music Productions at Purdue. “It’s used as an enhanced replay…We can show through graphic tools how wide a person is, that there’s no one around this receiver, etc. It’s really just the graphics being able to enhance those parts of a play that may not be noticeably obvious at first glance.”

According to Randy Dickerson, Senior Account Executive for ChyronHego, Paint can also be used as a teaching tool for coaches, especially while giving direction to players or designing the next play.

“There is an offline version of [Paint called] CoachPaint,” he says. “When a coach is trying to present a play to a player…they’re going to be using Paint tools to show who they’re supposed to run or who they’re supposed to block, things like that. It definitely has benefits for schools that way.”

After using Paint for a year, Purdue has experienced two major benefits:

1) Audience engagement

Hall says it’s a challenge to get an audience into the stands for a game, especially with ticket prices climbing and couches becoming more comfortable and convenient.