Happy New year, we are underway! This morning we began traveling and the racers started the 222km stage. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to explain how the TV gets put together.
The bit I am working on is the main world feed, 26 un-bias minutes of the best images and stories of the rally. Peterhansel said on Friday the rally has become less of an adventure and more of a competition over the years but the TV still very much see it as a tour. Christophe and Giles are concerned to get the best images rather than report directly on the race.
We have 3 helicopters, 4 camera crews on stage and then 2 in the bivouac or at the end of the stage to capture the interviews. The cameramen are responsible for asking the questions rather than anyone else. A large truck houses 20 Avid edit machines, 4 of which are responsible for the World feed. The rest are for private hire…for instance France Television have 5 to make their separate programme, Versus have 1 for make the features that surround the world feed.
Everyday the edit will begin when the first pictures arrive via satellites at CP1 and CP2. Helicopters drop their XDcam footage when they have done their section. Due to getting the programme to air for the evening, the programme must be finished by 3:30 Rally time. This makes life pretty tricky as some days the rally wont finish till well after that time, don’t expect to see a lot of the truck race! Due to these time constraints we try to make the features (which are less time dependant) and ‘What you Missed’ nice and long.
As well as trying to read the rally to steer the editors I also have to write a script on what the best stories are……the editors like pretty pictures and care little for me which can be tricky! The scripts are used for the various countries that don’t take my voice over to understand what is going!
My voice over gets added at the very last minute, well in fact as it goes to air with very little chance to see the finished product.
Once that is over the truck packs up and heads off to the next bivouac while myself and Alex go and chat to the drivers over dinner when they arrive. We can use this information for the VO the following day. Once the service park calms down then its time to put the tent up and sleep before an early wake up to fly to the next destination. Thankfully every day we fly rather than previous years where coach rides were common.
So my tent is up and I have logged on to Dakar.com to follow all the latest news for this years rally, fingers cross our first ‘live’ feed goes ok….
Over the rally I will be blogging on this site and on my new website www.benconstanduros.com where I will give you an in depth look into the workings of the rally and also keep up to date on the race itself at Dakar.com, I am at twitter to @Benconsty and SBS oz are kindly uploading the programme via
http://is.gd/jXXHy
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