MARATHON COVERAGE IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Think of a marathon as a sporting event with a 26.2 mile 50-yard line. The action takes place sequentially along the entire race route, and the “game camera” is mounted on a constantly moving motorcycle, just yards in front of the leaders.
Live coverage of a marathon is not the easiest remote to do.
Marathons have two different types of routes: one has a circular course where the start and finish line are in the same place; a second has different start and finish lines that are often a dozen or more miles apart.
“When we park mobile units to do a marathon, we’re not running miles and miles of cables to cameras,” said Glen Levine, vice president of operations for Pittsburgh-based mobile truck company NEP Supershooters, which covers several marathons annually.
“From the mobile unit perspective we’re covering strategically where the highlights are going to happen, such as the start and finish line,” he said.
The rest is left to RF cameras from microwave specialists Total RF of Bensalem, Pa., which supplies specially designed motorbikes with an aft-facing rear seat for the camera operator as well as trucks with gyrostablized mounts for the camera operators.
BOUNCE IN THE BIG CITY
Digital microwave has made a huge difference in getting the signal back from those moving camera platforms. For the New York City Marathon in November, Total RF has replaced the helicopter relays with microwave relays on top of three of the city’s buildings.
“If you go back to the days of analog, you had no choice, you had to use a helicopter,” said Steve Gansky, president of Total RF. “Reflections with NTSC meant phase change, which meant multipath, and the color [was] all over the place.
“Digital microwave loves the bounce in the big city, because it doesn’t matter how you get the ones and the zeros to the antenna, as long as you get them to the antenna, you build them back and you have perfect video.”
“Getting rid of helicopter relays reduced weather worries,” Gansky said. Fog or other no-fly weather can still keep helicopters from supplying aerial view of the race, but they don’t take down the whole race coverage as they could in the past.
Once the RF sites are in place on the rooftops, it’s time for a rehearsal, sans runners. “Put the guys on the motorcycles and start at the start line and wind up at the finish line just check your coverage,” Gansky said. “You rehearse and make sure everything’s working.”
Total RF receives the output of each camera vehicle from of all three rooftops in their own production truck. “We can get reception off of those motorcycles no matter where they are on the course, and we sub-switch which rooftop is receiving that particular motorcycle at that particular time, and we cut that,” Gansky said.
While the viewer only appreciates the video and audio signals coming from the camera vehicles to the receive site, it’s in fact a two-way microwave path.
“You have to get communications to the bike, because the director wants to direct,” said Gansky. “And additionally we send data to the bike to control the cameras, camera control, camera gain, so that the guy in the video can sit there and adjust the ped, the gain, just like the camera was in the studio.”
LEARNING FROM GOLF
While HD coverage has come to arena sports and even to golf, marathon coverage in the U.S. has yet to be done totally in HD. One reason has to do with all that RF and the long cable runs for fixed cameras.
“What we’re learning about golf with the world of HD is that there’s multiple ways to handle HD signals,” said NEP’s Levine. Where with triax they had to put in repeaters for long cable runs, “you can run a piece of SMPTE fiber 10,000 feet, and you may have to power the camera locally, but essentially because it’s fiber optics, you can send signals over great distances.”
Levine said another trick they’re adapting from golf coverage is running 12 strands of fiber optics in “tactical” cable to the truck. This allows them to daisy-chain from one camera location to the next camera location, and power the cameras locally. “It alleviates running 12 individual pieces of cable from the mobile truck to 12 cameras,” he said
From an RF standpoint, Gansky said Total RF could do an HD marathon today. “We are ready to provide HD in marathon coverage. However, our customers are not.”
The reason? Cost.
“HD transmission is at a much higher bit rate; you must use modulations that are less robust,” Gansky said. “Less robust equals more receive sites and more antennas, or better receive systems. That equals more cost. I do not think that our clients are currently willing to make the leap to native HD from the race course.”
In fact, with previously available spectrum disappearing to FCC auctions, just doing an SD marathon is getting harder.
“It’s almost where what’s available spectrum-wise dictates what spectrum you might do a production on,” he said. Not necessarily what’s best but what’s available.”
