Sony XDCAM HD goes where no other camcorder dares to tread

The Land Rover G4 challenge recently concluded with a win for South African athlete, Martin Dreyer.
Meanwhile, from a production perspective, Sony XDCAM HD has helped make the challenge a commercial success with transmission to a global audience of millions around the world.
Sony and its unique professional disc-based high definition cameras remained at the heart of the action right up to the dramatic closing seconds of the four week event.
“It was the portability and ruggedness of the XDCAM HD cameras and media as well as the ease at which material could be edited that made the format so suitable for fast-moving and high pressure productions like the Challenge,” explained Brad Lawson of BHP Sport, the UK crew employed to capture the event on video.
For BHP, just completing a production on time represented an equal challenge of resourcefulness and ingenuity, especially when it came to managing the constraints of harsh environmental and filming conditions like the final stage in the freezing Bolivian Andes and moving footage for editing.
“We had to use local TV stations in each country to satellite uplink our completed video news releases, which meant we not only needed fast turn-around of edits at the end of each stage to make feed times, we also had to locate the station, setup our own equipment and somehow break-down language barriers,” said Lawson. “It was such an immense and fast-moving production: not every project had a helicopter following the crew to transport a handful of small discs back to base at the end of each day’s shoot.”
Once the professional discs reached the Land Rover G4 Challenge headquarters, the team employed one of three different dual-screen edit systems and a dubbing suite to edit the footage together into final productions. The first suite was used for competitor market rushes and was there to meet the needs of the international media travelling with the Challenge as well as media outlets worldwide. The Costa Rican competitor also had her own rushes for local media coverage. The other editing suite was dedicated to the production of video news releases and on-event promos.
(GB/CD)