When F&V covered Vision III Imaging last summer, company founder Chris Mayhew gave us the details behind his “depth-enhancement” technology, which uses special “parallax scanning” lens adapters to capture depth information and give 2D footage an almost three-dimensional quality. Take a look at our original story for some video examples, and visit the V3 site to see a couple of sample shots from this year’s NFL coverage on CBS. With football season winding down, we followed up by calling Bob Fishman, a five-time Emmy-winning director at CBS Sports who is the first network-sports director to use the camera to see what he thought of the footage he got in basketball and football coverage this year. Fishman said he appreciated the three-dimensional effect, but was more interested in the camera’s ability to keep multiple subjects in focus on the field.

“A lot of guys in sports like to do rack focuses,” he told F&V. “This lens gives you everything in focus. It’ll get relationship shots when a guy’s standing on the freethrow line, with the players on defense juxtaposed against the guy shooting the basket. Everybody is in focus. The detail, combined with HD, of a player in the foreground with a player in the background, is extraordinary. It’s unlike any lens I’ve ever seen. And you can get perfectly in-focus shots of cheerleaders at the far end of the court as well as the player 10 feet from the lens.”

The downside, Fishman said, is that action shots that really take advantage of the V3 lens adapters’ capabilities can be few and far between during a game. “The lens is probably best used in a studio environment, in a controlled atmosphere, as opposed to shooting sports action,” he said. “But we took it out during football season, and we were getting good stuff on the bench and some really good replays. We were doing – I think it was the Miami-New England game. There were a lot of passing touchdowns in the corner of the end zone, and I use a handheld camera to cover that near receiver. Some of the replays we got, where the defender was leaping up and we see him from the back, heading toward the receiver with his hands extended, the detail of the defender and the receiver completely in focus was fairly spectacular. But those shots happen rarely.”

At the same time, Fishman said, the technology does well in a sports environment because its main weakness visually – it’s sometimes possible to notice the unnatural movement of the optical element in shots of mostly still imagery – isn’t seen in sports footage. “You can see a little bit of the turning of the lens in live shots, but it never bothered me because in sports somebody’s always moving,” he explained

Fishman said he is planning to use the lens again – but it depends on the performance of the new HD zoom unit for Angenieux and Fujinon lenses that V3 plans to introduce at NAB this year. (Check it out at the Angenieux/Thales booth.) Fishman says the lack of zoom capability is the main drawback to using V3 in sports coverage.

In addition to the forthcoming zoom hardware, V3 plans to target Internet Flash ads and mobile video. For an example of V3 in action in an online environment, take a look at the four Kitchen Chronicles promotional pieces DP Mark Karavite shot for for cabinet-maker Merillat, which are featured at www.merillat.com/video/.