Gearhouse Broadcast powers ATP World Tour Finals

The ATP World Tour Finals, which conclude at London’s O2 Arena on 27 November, mark the end of a gruelling eight month schedule for Gearhouse Broadcast’s 40-50 strong crew of cameramen, replay and audio operators, engineering staff, technicians, project managers and riggers that have been working on the tour all year.

With a highly experienced and professional crew – the company has been providing professional broadcast solutions to the ATP Masters tour for the past 11 years – Gearhouse Broadcast is able set up the 19 tonnes of kit needed to cover each tour event in a matter of a few days.

“It’s the continuity that our regular team bring that is very important to the tour organisers,” says Gearhouse Broadcast’s Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Moorhouse. “Due to the schedule and the travelling involved timescales are very tight, but as our crew know the equipment inside out they can turn it around quickly regardless of the venue. You just couldn’t do that with a different crew every time.”

For the eight-man ATP Masters final event in London, Gearhouse provided not less than 12 cameras to cover every conceivable angle of the action from the specially laid out indoor show court. The main action was captured through nine Sony HDC-1500 cameras, with one Grass Valley LDK 6000 wireless camera taking footage from amongst the crowd and around the stadium complex.

Normal slo-mo was provided by two Super Slo-mo Sony HDC-3300s courtside and an Antelope Ultra Slow Motion camera for extreme shots. With eight additional foreign broadcasters planning on taking coverage of Sunday’s final, the tapeless workload has been stored on six EVS servers and archived on to removable drives. XML log files enable each key piece of action – an ace, a smash or unforced error – to be designated a tag and logged, so they could be instantly recalled for putting together highlight packages or shown during breaks in play.