-
Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race and P2 HD
Hi Everyone,
I am writing this on my last morning in Alaska, I have said my goodbyes to our team and I am going home. For those of you who have been wondering what has happened to Barry this week, being that the number of posts have been a little low; well Barry has been in Alaska, working with the Iditarod production team. For those of you who have missed the announcement, Panasonic is a sponsor this year of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and what that means is that we supplied the P2HD cameras and some training folks to go with that. Additionally we are building a back story of training and the decision-making that went into the decision behind the Sponsorship. These stories will be on our site and will have been shot with the HVX200.
We have a website that is dedicated and right now we have some photos loaded and the videos are too far behind. They are working out the final streaming details. All of the video you will see on the site has been shot with the HVX200, and maybe a little with the HPX500. Keep in mind all of these are compressed for the internet and are not the raw files. As we move closer to the final “making of” documentary we will probably press it to a DVD and included some raw stuff to look at. But that is later.
The story is that Pansonic had five guys come in a week before the race to work with the shooters and teach them how to work with P2. The weather being what it is around here, where -40 is not uncommon out on the trail, P2 with its no moving parts looked ideal and so far has been the least of the troubles on the race. One of the favorite mushers, Doug Swingly had to scratch as he had a pretty serious accident and 11 of his dogs had to be air-lifted to a Veterinary hospital, the other 5 are okay. We have had our share of ESD, or Static sdismounting drives, and having to reboot systems. I thik out on the trail much of that goes away. Two of our guys continue on to the first Hub in McGrath today or tomorrow, when they can catch a ride on one of the small planes that are part of the Iditarod Airforce.
The Iditarod Team is doing clips on their Insider website, all of this footage has been captured with either the HVX200 or the HPX2000. They bring it in, import it to the timeline and then send it out to the web. The cutting style is not fancy but is newsworthy. Eventually the footage will make it into a documentary that will air on PBS or Discovery. Some of the footage will also be a part of the OLN/Versus Network 3 part series on the Iditarod.
Anyhow it has been a facinating week watching this all develop. And did I say Barry actually got some hands-on time with the HPX500. 😉 So if you visit our site at http://www.panasonic.com/broadcast, you will see an Iditarod Banner, when you click on it, the page will display where the photos are and the videos will be shortly.
There is also a click to the Iditarod site. Any video from this years event will be in a 16:9 format, all the 4:3 is from last years BetaSP stuff. I believe you can see some of the footage for free, but the majority is in the Insider membership, which is $19.95. I figure that most of us can spend $20 in a day and not have a clue what you spent it on, this will give you access to news on the race which I am currently finding to be addicting. Not only is this the last great race on earth, its coverage makes it one of the most challenging documentaries on earth.
Enjoy!
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
2 Replies
-
Impressive, Jan!
I was wondering how many P2 cards and/or P2 Stores were assigned to each shooter per day? And what format was being shot?
Dean Sensui — Imagination Media Hawaii
-
>I was wondering how many P2 cards and/or P2 Stores
>were assigned to each shooter per day?
Each of the four HPX2000 crews started out with about 20 cards.
They estimated that they would shoot between five and ten a day.
That gave them time for the cards to be transferred at a checkpoint and returned to the crew, as well as allow for logistic problems.
There are no P2 stores on the trail. The idea is to keep moving parts to a minimum.
The HVX200 crews got about the same number because they could record in PN mode and record the same amount of 24P as the HPX2000, without the PN mode.
The HPX2000 should have PN this summer but the early models do not.>And what format was being shot?
All the HPX2000 footage is 24P, ingested through P2 Drives onto a 24P timeline, with duplicate frames removed.
The HVX200 footage is 24PN, with the advantage of no duplicate frames to start with.
24P is working well for most of the motion sequences. They can shoot 60/24 to preserve quick action. The 24P format is especially useful for the web uploads because it reduces the loading on the encoder, the servers, and the viewing machines.
Editing is done on MacBook Pro with FCP to mirrored G-RAIDs through 1394B interfaces.crc
Vision Unlimited/LA
Prairieville, LA
HD production technical support since 1987
…searching for the right tools for the job…
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up