supertri was back in London’s docklands on 8th September for the fourth year running showcasing top triathlon talent in the short form, supertri events have expanded to five locations this year. The team visited two new sites in the US for the first two rounds before heading to London. Aurora Media Worldwide are the Host Broadcasters and have partnered with EMG / Gravity Media as facilities vendor. EMG / Gravity Media Unit Manager, Jon Giles, has been leading the technical planning and delivery for the second year running and explains the facilities delivery.
“August saw the start of the supertri season where we worked with our EMG / Gravity Media USA colleagues to deliver two successful events in Boston and Chicago. These run alongside local mass participation events which brings the added challenges of not being able to deploy many cameras (and cables) to final positions until an hour or so before on air as well as overcoming some of the challenges working around road closures, the public and different working cultures.
Our US team deployed Aspen, the newest truck in the US fleet for both events, supported by equipment from the US and UK and engineers from EMG / Gravity Media Connectivity for RF coverage. Our client, Aurora was really pleased with the facilities provided and while we had some location challenges I am proud to say we got everything online before transmission!!
supertri is distributed to numerous territories, and is usually available on Eurosport, YouTube, World Triathlon and many other domestic broadcasters. Next stop was the London event, with the broadcast available on BBC iPlayer, for what was a homecoming event for many of the successful Olympians from the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The crowds were out in force to see Olympic Champions, Alex Yee and Cassandre Beaugrand alongside home favourites, including Georgia Taylor-Brown.
West India Quay, in the shadow of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers, is an exciting if tightly packed course for the athletes, taking in bumpy cobbles, pot-holed road surfaces, tight turns and hairpins. We deployed NOVA 118 to cover the event which took in five HDC-3500 line cameras, three handheld RF cameras, one RF polecam from EMG / Gravity Media specialist camera company, ACS, one RF Moto bike mounted camera, two minicams and two drone feeds – an eclectic mix of sensors and cameras on a sunny and challenging day for Vision!
Together with our Connectivity colleagues in our RF specialist division we worked with Motocam and Aerios Solutions to deliver the bike and drone cameras and delivered a faultless RF coverage of the bike and RF downlinking of the FPV drone. supertri and Aurora are keen to develop the use of drones in live TV events and for the second year we successfully worked together to catch a tiny 25mW signal from a racing drone with a fixed camera, hand off an ASI feed to the drone team who passed back the video signal for colour correction and use in the programme. Without any form of live camera control on board managing colour and exposure is challenging but with a combination of SV200s and V-pro processing we were able to achieve some impressive results.
The production team wanted the drone to fly at chest height behind the runners which, when surrounded by crowd in the finish straight, caused some RF issues but our ever-attentive RF team made adjustments to the antenna deployment to improve this further… live product development in action! Save to say this made the difference and the team were really pleased!
Coming up in October and November supertri moves onto Toulouse, France and NEOM, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Based on past experience these venues offer different challenges but with the help or our EMG / Gravity Media colleagues in France and the Middle East I’m confident we’ll deliver first class coverage for Aurora of these great venues!”
