All About HD P2 Workflow Covering the Iditarod in Alaska

Caporale is a freelance production professional and part-time consultant to Panasonic Broadcast. He, along with four other consultants – Art Aldrich, Bernie Mitchell, C.R. Cailouett, and Barry Green – traveled to Anchorage, Alaska, to train the freelance production crew covering the 2007 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on using Panasonic's new HPX2000 (shoulder mounted) and HVX200 (handheld) P2 solid-state HD camcorders. To properly cover the race in 720p HD, the Iditarod crew used 150 P2 cards (8 GB each). The race started in Anchorage on March 4 and the winner, Lance Mackey, crossed the finish line in Nome nine days, five hours, eight minutes and 41 seconds later.

Footage was cut on MacBook Pro laptops running Apple Final Cut Pro and, in most cases, uploaded to the Internet for worldwide viewing within 20 minutes or less. The footage will also be edited into long-form programs that have already aired or will appear on Versus (formerly the Outdoor Life Network) and the Iditarod's yearly DVD. This was the first year that the world-famous Iditarod Race was captured in HD.

To record the many aspects of the 1,150-mile race, eight video crews with P2 HD equipment (including the Panasonic P2 Mobile portable recorder/player) shot from a variety of vehicles, including a helicopter with a Wescam rig and two snowmobiles. More than 50 P2 cards were assigned to the chopper because it stayed out longer and the other 100 were divided among the remaining seven crews-four model 2000 cameras and three 200s (two of which were on snowmobiles). In the end, 110 hours of P2 HD video footage was captured.

Q: How cold was it and how did the P2 gear hold up?
A: The cameras were kept outdoors for five days solid at temperatures averaging minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, with winds ranging 40 miles-an-hour and above, and they performed perfectly. Honestly, there was not a single problem capturing images in the extreme cold or from the rigorous demands made upon the workflow in these remote conditions.

The immediacy of the P2 workflow allowed the crew to get images up very quickly onto the Internet. It was pretty impressive, and it has never happened this fast before. Race coverage in the past had been spotty at best, because the crews had to lug around a large 400 lb. C-band satellite dish to upload footage from their tape-based cameras, which frequently failed to perform in the harsh conditions of Alaska. This year we were getting an average of about 20-30 clips up per day, showing viewers where the racers were on the course and who was in the lead.

Q: How did you manage in such extreme conditions?
A: Thermal vests were made by Porta-Brace for all the cameras. They were ultimately only used to transport the cameras into and out of the elements. It was hard to work with the vests in the field because many of the camera buttons and controls are covered up and you can't see what you were doing. In this harsh environment every second that you have skin exposed becomes critical, so trying to change settings in a bag takes more time and gloves have to come on and off, and bags have to be removed to find buttons. It just becomes too much to manage. The bags were a great idea, and perhaps with familiarity and practice they would have improved our conditions, but under such a short ramp-up time they only seemed to slow us down.

Anton Bauer provided large batteries that extended our shooting times in cold weather, and this was a godsend. They performed so well that I never had to change a battery in the course of the day.

At one point the HPX2000s, as well as the HVX200s, were exposed to the elements for five days straight, at -35 and below, and they performed flawlessly. It got so cold that one of the lenses broke off a camera at the lens-mount because the screws got metal-fatigued and simply crumbled. This happened as the camera was being picked up-and it wasn't a heavy lens. That's how cold it was. Yet, the cameras, the cards and the images stored on the P2 cards were not affected by the cold.

In another incident, a producer was juggling P2 cards in and out of a camera, so to prevent dropping a card in the snow, she stuck one in her mouth for a second and it froze to her tongue. The images on the card remained intact. That's about the worst that happened. We did not have a single problem either with the performance of the cameras or the P2 cards or the workflow-not one single crash, lost clip, corruption or anything in 110 hours of footage.

Q: What HD production lessons did you learn?
A: The big lesson we learned is that with proper management and planning, there is nothing to fear about working with P2 in remote and extremely harsh conditions. It outperformed tape, both in reliability and immediacy, in this type of application.

Images of the race can be viewed at www.panasonic.com/iditarod. For more on Caporale and his production company, visit: www.24pdigitalcinema.com.