In Broadcast - November 2012 - 40

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 14 - NOV/DEC 2012

InFOCUS
Closer To The Sports Action
Advances in camera systems continues to bring the viewer ever closer to the action, Andy Stout uncovers the cutting-edge technology in use…
On October 14, Felix Baumgartner calmly stepped off a platform tethered under a helium-filled balloon into 39,045 metres of sky. What’s more eight million people watched him doing it live. Away from the magnitude and bravery of Baumgartner’s achievement, when it comes to the coverage of the event itself most of the press focus has centred on the fact that those eight million people were watching concurrent streams on YouTube. This broke all previous records for the Googleowned company (which, in comparison, estimates that London 2012 livestream coverage probably peaked at around half-a-million). In a sense though that misses the real story, which is that there were any images at all for anyone to watch anywhere. Shooting Baumgartner’s jump pushed the technology of capturing extreme sports action to its absolute limit. All the camera systems were designed and developed by the mission’s director of high-altitude photography, Jay Nemeth of FlightLine Films and in the capsule alone included nine Lux Media Plan HD1200 mini cameras, three RED ONEs, and three high-res digital still cameras. These were all linked into a pressurised electronics ‘keg’ containing somewhere in the region of two miles of wiring, and where necessary were even placed in pressurised housings filled with nitrogen gas to keep them within operational temperatures. Thirteen Panasonic P2 recorders recorded the footage, which was downconverted to SD for transmission to the ground station and the live feed (HD kit not being up to the task when the capsule was designed three years ago). A Riedeldeveloped system offered complete remote control, and featured three microwave video downlinks that were dynamically assigned to the selected cameras. The jump also utilised the ground-based JLAIR optical tracking system, which has been more used to tracking Space Shuttles ascending into orbit rather
Andy Stout

Baumgartner’s pressure suit featured HD minicams

than ﬁlming men falling from the edge of space. It is all astonishingly hi-tech, but then you get to the suit, where the Red Bull Stratos team strapped three GoPro Hero HD minicams to capture footage for post-jump distribution. NASA-developed kit and the sort of cameras that people strap to their helmets before they go mountain biking? Welcome to the world of capturing extreme sports...

Going Pro
That certainly isn’t to decry the GoPro, though, whose newly launched Hero 3 is even capable of 4K imaging (albeit at a modest 12fps). And while the ubiquitous GoPro Hero cameras have been responsible for a happy slew of amateur extreme PoV images on YouTube over the years, even the professionals have been increasingly

happy to turn to them as a cheap, semi-disposable acquisition source. This was helped enormously by the ProTune Mode ﬁrmware upgrade announced at NAB, which added a 24fps framerate, a 35Mbps data rate and a neutral colour proﬁle to the range, allowing them to be integrated far more easily into broadcast productions. Indeed, ESPN used more than 150 of them in the last Summer X-Games to capture the action from all conceivable angles, including 40 mounted in an array on a long pole to capture 360-degree style shots (though these needed a fair amount of work in post before broadcast). “We’ve been doing this stuff since 1995, so we’ve got pretty good at it,” says ESPN’s Paul DiPietro of the X-Games. “One of
CONTINUED ON PAGE 42

A few of the array of cameras ﬁtted to the capsule

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In Broadcast - November 2012

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