Volvo Ocean Race - Boston In Port Races

Another late night, liquid dinner and early morning. Yes, my eyes think it's next year. Today is set aside for the in-port race which starts at about 16:15 UK time. A modified Olympic sausage designed to entertain the great and the good at each stopover. It's also streamed live to the web and captured in superb High Definition for the world's media.

Yesterday I went on one of the yachts, Telefonica. I was following the engineers who ensure the continued operation of the TV systems. Each yacht is effectively a five camera Outside Broadcast unit which can be remote controlled by a shore based media team when required. Usually operated by the media crew member (a sort of embedded reporter on steroids) they capture footage during the the legs of the race and beam back HD material by Inmarsat's Fleet Broadband - well, OK, it's HDV but still pretty good.

So seven mobile studios each feed any one of five cameras into two receivers which are switch between the yachts and provide inputs to the Anycast. A helicopter with another linked camera flies above dodging the traffic from the airport. The yachts' positions are fed to a graphics simulator. This all gets mixed and streams live to the web from Volvo's TV race site.

Along with the EX-1s, 3s and Z-1s here will be several PDW-700's in RIBs and helicopters capturing the news coverage. Not a single SD camera in sight. These cameramen are the best at boat to boat as you can see from the footage.

The Volvo Ocean Race is a very big media deal. The media team works long and late most days. Today could be a 20hr sprint with lunatic numbers of XDCAM discs to ingest. News VNR will be clipped up and about 20mins of XDCAM will be ready for transfer back to the UK by a system called JATS which works at about 8Mbs per sec unlike FTP which can only manage a few measly kBps.

I am going to watch the races from the a RIB. It's currently a flat calm and looks like it won't blow up too much. I suppose that this means a long day on the water.

VOR In-port Race - Boston

...and this is what I saw.

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