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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

Is the advertising board behind faked then? Shouldn't that be static relative to the finish line, and therefore not really show up?

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I was curious what the advertising board would have looked like to the athletes -- it must be a bit distracting to see a display scrolling at ~10m/s!

You can see it here at 9m50s:

https://youtu.be/7Xnr805bm4E?feature=shared&t=590

It's just a single animated strip, one pixel wide. I assume the camera array is on the opposite side.

Video no longer available :-(

NBC is very quick to DMCA Olympics clips.

NBC isn't DMCA-ing the official Olympics channel.

NBC is very quick to DMCA Olympics clips.

Writing a check for $12,000,000,000.00 will do that to you.

https://marketrealist.com/p/how-much-did-nbc-pay-for-the-oly...

Region blocked from the US.

Thanks for pointing that out! This video doesn't seem to be available in the US, so you can also see it in the slow motion footage here, right on the finish line:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcxyXnPIF4o#t=2m45s

(You can see it in normal speed too, but I can feel the formation of shapes better in the slow-mo, instead of it just feeling like blinking)

Ha, and that video isn't visible outside the US!

I guess pick one or the other depending on your country (or if neither works, search for one that does).

This makes total sense as a way to quickly validate the cameras calibration visually. “Does the ad look correct?”

Clever.

It’s weird that it still comes out distorted though. You’d think they’d know the correct rate to play it back at, since they’re the ones capturing it.

They would need to know beforehand the precise span between the first and last athletes.

I think they did a pretty good job, it's only slightly stretched for an event when there was only 0,12 seconds between the first and the last runners, which is unusual.

I don’t see why the distance between athletes has anything to do with it; they record at a fixed speed which presumably is the estimated speed of the winner crossing the line. So it’s known in advance, and the stretch factor if they get that speed exactly right is 1 anyway.

And of course when I say ‘speed’, I mean [width of strip] / [time between the capture of each strip].

This smells of a cascading dongle tape wrapped and marked "sprints #3"

Oh thanks for this! I had the same question and assumed the Omega branding and Olympic rings were superimposed onto the image; I never assumed it would actually be an animated advertisement timed perfectly to match the runners' pace! I assume they had a different backdrop speed for the women's race, according to their projected pace? Or would the ad look squished for them? (or alternatively, the runners stretched?)

Now that I look at it, the logos in the men's photo finish look stretched, so maybe it's calibrated for the women's pace.

I was there at the time, and I could clearly see how the advertising board works. It's a vertical line of LEDs that constantly rotates through the columns of the logo. To the naked eye it just seems to be flickering randomly.

According to Reddit thread on this, the led board behind is specifically animated with the right timing so the content shows up correctly in the line camera.

There is a special advertising board that only the camera can see.

There's a narrow display behind the finish line with a quickly-scrolling banner ad.

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