Olympic Scandal & Horror!

(Edited and adapted from an article by HANS LA COUR, originally published in the NZ Video News - our thanks to NZVN.)

The Olympic sailing competitions were held on 5 different race courses in Fushan Bay, just off Quindao, a city of 9 million people. The sailing on course A, close to the marina breakwater, was broadcast live to the Olympic world feed, for rights-holders such as TVNZ. Racing on race courses B to E was recorded by ENG crews and compiled into a nightly highlights package, also made available to rights-holders.

Several NZ crew people were in Qingdao to work on the live television coverage of the Olympic sailing competitions. I was the DP and Principal Cameraman for the live sailing, while a former committee member of the Techos’ Guild, Haresh Bhana, was Leading Audio Engineer, and Guild member Dave Cooke was one of the Audio Engineers.

It was an International Olympic Committee requirement in 2008 that for the first time all Olympic broadcasts must originate from HD cameras, and that all broadcasts should include 5.1 surround sound.

For the live broadcast, we had two helicopters, three chase boats, and four remote-controlled on-board pod cameras as well as four shore-based cameras, two of which had 86x stabilized box lenses.

Normally we would use Cineflex or Gyron stabilized heads for all helicopters and chase boats. But these units contain some fancy stabilization technology developed for the US Department of Defence. (They say that if you take the right bits out of a Cineflex, then you can build your own cruise missile. Don’t know if it’s true, I have not tried...)

The US Government has a list of “Bad Countries” to which this technology must not be exported. The Axis of Evil, of course, plus places like Iraq, Cuba and... you guessed it, China. So for months we expected not to have any stabilized heads for aerial and boat-based shooting at the Olympics in China. Not just sailing was to suffer: the marathon, road cycle racing, the triathlon, walking, and even the Opening Ceremony would look like pre-Wescam days.

A Spanish company, Service Vision, was contracted to develop a stabilization system based on their successful 2-axis Scorpio heads, used in the movie industry. This was still very primitive, though, and inadequate for long lens HD image acquisition.

As luck would have it, the US State Department decided, only three weeks before the Games, that we could have some systems exported to China, as a special exception from their rules – but with a number of restrictions as to who could use them and how they had to be stored!

Owing to Chinese regulations**,** we had to use two 9-person Dauphine troop carrier helicopters for our aerial shots, flown by Chinese army pilots. These helis are so big that they can’t hover for more than a short time, and it was not possible to nose-mount a stabilized head – hardly suitable aircraft for the world’s premier sailing gig!

Our ENG crews were shooting on P2 cameras for the first time in Olympic sailing. Each camera had 5 x 32GB cards, so no shortage of memory. Great, you would think, but not so. The P2 concept was a disaster for the event in my opinion, but only because the infrastructure needed to handle this format was non-existent.

The organisers had brought in two brand new Final Cut Pro systems to edit the highlights programme. The Panasonic engineer who worked with us could not get the FCP systems to edit straight off the HD footage on the cards. This meant that all the footage had to be ingested to the FCP hard drives and converted to FCP codecs. This took much longer than real time. Add to this that the systems were not networked, so they could not access the footage freely. The FCP system hard drives weren’t big enough to keep each day’s footage for the whole event, so the local hard drives were purged for footage on a daily basis.

All the daily ENG footage had to be sent to the IBC in Beijing for archiving each night, but with four racecourses and maybe 30 races, the producer quickly found out that it was a very slow process. They did not even have a fibre or satellite link to Beijing but had to FTP the P2 full-resolution HD clips!

The result of all of this was that the ENG shooters were instructed to shoot nine clips (yes! Nine clips) per race only. Start, mark roundings for the first couple of boats, finish, that’s it. No chance to tell the story of the race.

Today, those tapes from previous events are kept on shelves somewhere by the IOC, who own the footage. This means that if I want to buy a shot of Barbara Kendall going it alone on the left side of the course in race 3 of the round robins in the Sydney 2000 Games, the IOC can go get the tape, check if the shot is there, wind forward to the time code on the logging sheet, dub it off, and send it to me.

Not anymore. Because of the poor planning around the P2 format, the shooters were only allowed their nine shots. Everything else was either not shot or has been deleted – forever.

This is the scandalous and horrible consequence of not being set up to use the technology that the Olympic sponsor, Panasonic, forced upon the event. It is like creating a ‘digital hole’: The footage has either disappeared or was never shot, and purely because the logistics needed to deal with the P2 concept were not in place.

It is the main weakness of the hard memory concept in a nutshell: Beautiful cameras, plenty of P2 cards, but without the infrastructure to deal with it, it’s useless. I really did like that cardboard box of old...

There is an old saying that every director and cameraman would have used once or twice:

“We did not shoot it, so it never happened!”

Unfortunately, for the ENG side of the Olympic sailing, the competition actually did happen – but we weren’t allowed to shoot it.

Qingdao has certainly been a challenging venue. But we only met genuinely friendly and helpful people, and we had a great crew. If we get to do it again in 2012, we can hopefully iron out those problem areas we had.