North One Television, SIS LIVE enhance Isle of Man TT production

Coverage of the Isle of Man TT (Tourist Trophy) motorcycle races continues to expand with the 2013 event featuring more cameras and on-board shots for broadcast, as well as multi-platform output that includes a new app for Android and iOS.

Production company North One Television and facilities provider SIS LIVE have added to last year’s production, which forms the basis for the 2013 technical operation. SIS LIVE has deployed cameras with solid state recorders ‘round the 37-mile race route along the roads of the Irish Sea island. These are remotely controlled by text message, with material collected once the day’s competition has finished. Footage is then ingested into a tapeless production system and edited for two one-hour programmes: one destined for UK commercial broadcaster ITV4, the other for international channels. These are distributed using SIS LIVE’s dual antenna uplink vehicle.

As well as the course mini-cams, which include units mounted on the roadside kerbs, and conventional camcorders, a high-speed Hi-motion II is used to produce super slo-mo pictures of the bikes, showing how they move at speed and the way riders control them.

New additions for this year include more on-board cameras, giving a racer’s eye view of the course, and a Sony FS700 4k high-speed camcorder. “We have more on-boards than ever and are testing new cameras,” comments North One’s head of production, Robert Gough. “We also have more filming positions and will be using a FS700 to capture more crafted feature content, making the most of the shallow depth of field and variable frame rates.”

Gough adds that the ingest and workflow management system for coverage of the TT has been expanded, with an increase in speed for media management. As well as broadcast TV the races are fed to multi-platform media, including a new TT App. This offers course and weather conditions, the latest race news, rider profiles, live timings and feeds of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and RSS, with live audio from Manx Radio TT.