Alpine World Ski Championships: super-high-speed images captured with Antelope

The FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Beaver Creek is not only home to the best alpine skiing athletes but also base for one of the biggest live TV productions of the year. Host Broadcaster EPC, in charge of production of the World Feed together with international director Michael Koegler, carefully selected a large number of stunning camera positions to show the speed and finesse of the fastest athletes in winter sports.

LMC is providing three Antelope MkIIs Ultra Motion systems, one Antelope AIR with link RF transmission and one Antelope PICO V2 POV UltraSlowMotion for the World Feed. Together with LMC´s own systems a crew of five engineers also operate one PoleCam PICO, which is owned by EPC.

The Polecam PICO is positioned at the start gate and provides both live images from the race start as well as replays with up to 525 frames/second. All CCUs, RCPs and OCPs are mounted in Game Creek´s Dynasty B unit.

“The cooperation with both EPC and Game Creek is extremely smooth,” said Nikolai Bonstedt, technical director of LMC for the World Championships. “We have to move cameras from Mens to Ladies venues every day but all crew members and helping hands are doing a fantastic job to make everything happen”.

EPC CEO Franck Choquard said, “when you get the super-high-speed images at the right time and moment, they offer amazing pictures. We’ve been asked why do we need two wireless cameras at the bottom of the course (one is an Antelope AIR). But today, when [US skier] Bode Miller crashed, we could get a close shot of his wife and the emotion. And sport is more than action; it is the emotion carried to the people around it.”

All control of the Antelope systems are handled by LMC staff out of Game Creek´s Dynasty B unit. “Everybody is really pleased with the super easy integration of our equipment,” said Dirk Wolf, one of the engineers on site. “They were pretty amazed about the Antelope technology.”

The AIR system,  the PICOS and the MkIIs systems all have broadcast standard CCUs which easily connect to the truck infrastructure. “The fact that we don´t need to connect to lots of small pieces of equipment makes life so much easier for the truck engineers and they very much appreciate it,” said Thomas Beeskow, the RF engineer for the Antelope AIR.

The Polecam PICO had its debut at the Hahnenkamm Race in Kitzbuehel just prior to the World Championships. Two systems were in place, one at the start gate and one at the steep ‘Mausefalle’. The high frame-rate of 350 fps and the ability to ‘fly’ the camera with the athlete down the jump created a completety new look and feel for one of the toughest jumps in Alpine skiing.

Another new feature is the Polecam PICO being used as both live line camera at the start and producing highspeed replays from the start and the first couple of  gates. The next World Championships for the Antelope will be the World Relay Championships in Nassau, Bahamas early May.