In Broadcast - November 2012 - 42

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 Cont.
Or as ESPN’s DiPietro says: “In-car cameras plus an automobile crash is always a challenging scenario.”

Dark Art
There are several different forces at work that can conspire to break equipment, most of which are already known to most cameramen and OB crews. It’s just that extreme sports tend to expose the kit to more of them. Water (the corrosive nature of salt water is even worse), force (acceleration and rapid deceleration), temperature, vibration, dirt...the list tends to go on. “Winter is always a little more of a challenge. I’m not in a stadium, I’m on the side of a mountain, it’s 10,000ft and it’s snowing,” says DiPietro. “But we also have a lot of events in the stadiums that are dirt-track based, and you’re making and breaking ﬁbre connections as you go on and the events change. You have to be very careful there: dirt and ﬁbre optics really don’t mix that well.” Then of course you have to add in the problems of size, with the demand often being that the cameras are as small and unobtrusive as possible – a challenge given that HD units tend to be bigger than SD ones. They also tend to draw more current, leading to further cabling issues as crews struggle to supply them with enough power to keep operating. There seems to be rough agreement though that in-car cameras are probably the units that suffer the most and cause the most problems. An understanding of vibration and an understanding of damping are both needed to get them working reliably, as is an
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America’s Cup onboard camera systems provided by SIS LIVE

the challenges though is that it’s constantly changing. It’s not like a soccer ﬁeld or a baseball ﬁeld which haven’t changed much in a while, the course are constantly evolving. I can rattle off the camera position of an NFL game now, whereas we go look at an X-Games course and think ‘Okay the guys will come through here at this angle, at this speed’. It’s constantly changing.” But for live material and more challenging environments, broadcasters have to raise their game significantly beyond the prosumer level.

Bespoke Systems
Paul McNeil is Special Projects Manager for SIS LIVE, and as such is used to building specialist kit for specialist environments, such as the America’s Cup. He cites the main challenge of his job as “all live sports that require shots from the ‘ﬁeld of play’” – irrespective of whether it is a sports ground, an ocean or a mountain slope. SIS LIVE’s work on the current America’s Cup series, which started in 2011 and comes to a climax in San Francisco next September, illustrates the sort of commitment involved. At the opening race it deployed 36 specially developed agile cameras coupled to seven control units, and all together managed 21 simultaneous RF links from the yachts, chasing yachts and helicopters involved. By the second race in rather choppy conditions, the director was cutting to live shots of the yacht-mounted cameras going underwater.

“Apart from the obvious challenges relating to climatic conditions, such as water, force, temperature, etc the main challenges come with the positioning of cameras and systems in relation to the subject,” he says. “In extreme sports more often than not the cameras are body worn or located in the ﬁeld of play. This raises a number of issues which need to be considered even before planning the content of the shot itself, such as whether the camera systems would interfere with the subject performing the sport, whether it interferes with the sport rules, and, indeed, whether the sport rules would need to be changed to enable the shot.” He also states that safety for all

concerned is paramount, which is certainly an issue that has delayed the deployment of skycams in some sports for several years. The safety of the kit itself also has to be considered too though. “Although avoided when possible it is sometimes the case that these cameras are placed in situations which may cause them damage,” he adds. “The occasional £90 SD bullet camera on a race car may be written off as a risk worth taking for the action that can be captured, but it is a more difﬁcult decision when an HD camera is worth £3,000. The other option then is to play it safe but lower the production values and excitement of the coverage.”

BSI cameras help grab Indy car action

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In Broadcast - November 2012

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