Live from Wimbledon 2023: ACS delivers behind the scenes shots

Members of the ACS team racking beauty cameras at the Championships

Aerial Camera Systems (ACS) has expanded its coverage of the Wimbledon Championships, providing more remotely operated cameras around the grounds and at the players’ practice areas in response to broadcasters’ keenness for more behind the scenes coverage of the tennis tournament.

Since Wimbledon Broadcast Services took over host broadcast duties in 2018 there has been a steady increase in the number of remote cameras around the grounds, with this year’s Championships ACS’ biggest to date, with the supply of 46 robotic camera channels.

“There’s an additional eight robotics units that are doing the new arrivals area and behind the scenes,” explains ACS sales director Matt Coyde.

ACS team (left to right): Owen Bissmire, Matt Coyde, Malcolm Rogers

“The idea is to bring players into the building and show their journey behind the scenes and them going on and off Centre Court.

“For those, we’ve built bespoke camera brackets for all of the positions that have been custom designed to the match the look that the club needed.”

Coyde, who spoke with SVG Europe during the Championships, says the other big change was around format. “Essentially, the whole site has now gone either UHD-HDR, or 1080p HDR. That’s a massive format change because the implications are, across all the camera systems that we provide, they all have to essentially be UHD capable.

“So on top of all the changes around ensuring that all our equipment was compatible with that format, we also have this core infrastructure to help distribute all those signals and feeds into the NEP system. And so that was an additional area of work that we needed to do for this year.

“All the work’s been done to make sure we can fully integrate with the rest of the production workflows. All the cameras are all broadcast cameras, based around the  Sony HDC P50 camera with the UHD licence, plus upgraded fibre systems. So we’ve deployed quite a lot of new 12G fibre transmission systems that we’ve designed and built in house. It’s been quite a complex project.

Read more Live from Wimbledon 2023: Upping UHD and HDR coverage of the Championships

Including hoist and tracking systems, ACS provided 46 robotic camera channels in total, with 26 operators.

“So you can see that as we add more cameras, we’re not necessarily adding a camera operator for each camera. So there are some efficiencies that we can offer there,” says Coyde.

ACS, which is part of the EMG Group, has been involved on site for over 20 years. ACS along with sister company EMG Connectivity (formerly Broadcast RF) announced a four-year extension of their contracts with WBS just ahead of the Championships.

Read more Live from Wimbledon 2023: Paul Davies on mic’ing up players and boosting behind the scenes access