BHP Sport:
Chronicling Endurance in High Def
The Land Rover G4 Challenge became the Apple G5 challenge recently, when London-based production and post-production company, BHP Sport, took two Mac-based edit suites halfway around the world to capture the one-month global endurance race.
The 2006 Land Rover G4 Challenge (the ‘G’ is for global, and the ‘4’ is for the four continents across which the event takes place) ran from April 2rd to May 20th, and offered men and women from 18 nations the chance to test their bodies and minds in a gruelling 4x4 driving and multi-sport endurance race. The route took in both urban and rural locations; and competitors had to drive, cycle, climb and kayak their way through some of the world’s most inhospitable environments along the way.
The race commenced in Bangkok from where the teams drove north-east through rural Thailand to the border of Laos. Stage two kicked off in the wilderness of south-east Asia before the competitors were shipped to South America for stages three and four. Rio de Janeiro was the first stop, followed by the rugged Bolivian interior. The final stage was the 12,000 sq km Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt lake, situated 4,000 metres above sea level at the crest of the Andes.
BHP Sport’s remit throughout the adventure was to film everything: “If it moved, we filmed it”, says Phil Seymour, general manager. “We started filming when the competitors got out of their tents in the morning, and finished with them getting back in at the end of the day — plus everything in between”.
They were required to produce a series of six programmes for Channel 4, as well as an international version of five programmes. Seymour adds: “During the event, we also produced six video news releases (VNRs) on site, which were made available to all TV channels around the globe”.
The project was logistically complex; and to add to the challenge, BHP Sport decided to conduct the entire exercise in HD. Seymour explains: “We’ve had a relationship with Sony for many years. We approached them ahead of the second G4 Challenge and said: ‘What can you offer us in HD?’ They delivered five XDCAM HD camcorders straight off the production line to our Milton Keynes office two days before the event. It was a very tight turnaround; we tested everything then shipped it out”.
As far as post-production was concerned, BHP Sport editor, Digby Wright, says: “We took along two 2.5GHz Power Mac G5s (one with 8TB of RAID storage and the other with 4TB) running Final Cut Pro 5.1 with a beta plug-in from Sony for the XDCAM HD file transfer”. BHP Sport has been using Final Cut Pro since 2003, when it migrated from Media 100, also running on the Mac platform.
Seymour is particularly impressed by FCP’s flexibility: “As it is a resolution-independent package, we can use it on our high-end HDCAM projects through to HDV and down to uncompressed 10-bit SD or just plain offlining in DV, but still have all the tools at hand to produce a top-end product. Having seven Final Cut Pro suites at our London-based facility that can swap between these standards also gives me the freedom to place jobs in any edit suite and know that it will work at a price that doesn’t break the bank”.
“We had one MacBook Pro in the edit suite where we could browse disks separate to the edit. The other was out in the field where the crew could use it to browse rushes and generate an EDL.”
As far as the Challenge was concerned, Final Cut Pro’s reliability was key. Seymour says: “Because the Challenge took us at least 18 hours from the nearest Apple store, at it’s approximate closest point, we needed to have the confidence in FCP to be able to push the boundaries of our production and still produce our programmes on time”.
Wright makes the same point in relation to the hardware: “We were hauling this gear all over the world, into some very extreme conditions. In Laos, temperatures rose to 46°C, with humidity at 85-90 per cent. In Bolivia, temperatures dropped to -20°C overnight and there was thick, chalky dust absolutely everywhere. We needed something that was 100 per cent reliable”.
Also key to the mobile setup were two 23-inch Apple Cinema Displays, 4GB Atto Fibre cards and Blackmagic Extreme breakout cards. Seymour explains: “The Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme was used to monitor HD SDI pictures from Final Cut Pro and to layoff the VNRs in 4x3 SD to take to the feed stations, and any broadcaster and market requests on site”.
And how well did Final Cut Pro work with the HD feeds? “The XD CAM HD records HD video straight to disk in a file format”, explains Seymour. “We could access these files via FireWire and the disk appears just like a DVD. By using the proxy viewer, we were able to browse the low-res pictures that get recorded at the same time as the HD pictures. We could mark in/out points or pull the whole file into Final Cut”.
BHP Sport also took along two Intel-powered MacBook Pro systems, also running Final Cut Studio. Wright says: “We had one MacBook Pro in the edit suite where we could browse disks separate to the edit. The other was out in the field where the crew could use it to browse rushes and, if they had time, generate an EDL”. This facility was extremely useful considering the BHP Sport crew generated 218 90-minute disks of footage.
“The best thing about the Apple gear is that nothing failed”, concludes Wright. “It’s amazing considering how it was bounced about and the conditions we worked in, but everything went smoothly”.
