A Bit of Perspective...
 

OK, so what does this say aboout me?

Michael Phelps just won a history-making 8 medals in a single olympics. he's broken seven world-records... and all I want is to see a good shot of the Steadicam rig that's shooting him from the other side!

Well, I guess we know where my priorities lie... it was extremely exciting to watch the race, but at the end of the day the Steadicam caught my attention the most!

Yes, and did you see the steadicam at the end of the women's marathon.

First there was a guy in the wide shot running backwards/sideways in front of the winner around the track.

But more interesting was the next shot. Chasing from behind was a fairly lengthy shot that was rocking back and forth like a ship in the storm.

Does anyone know what cameras and rigs they are using at the Olympics? How are the signals getting sent out from the camera?

There were 2 operators in shot a bunch of times at the end of the Mens 100meters.

I just watched the closing ceremonies, and from a wide shot of the entire stadium floor, with a sea of thousands of dancers in yellow outfits, and thousands of dancers in red outfits, and hundreds of performers wearing light up costumes, the only thing that caught my eye was that one little black dot, which of course was the steadicam guy filming on the field.

Watching the closing ceremonies I noticed the Steady Cam guys too. From what I could see there were two of them around the base of the Memory Tower (I think that's what they called it). When I saw them, and the performers started to collapse in toward the tower I just thought, man, those guys are gonna get crushed!

Also, I think it was after the men's water polo match, they were interviewing one of the US players and there was guy in the background disconnecting a camera from the crane; I ended up watching the guy in the background and missed the whole interview.

Yes, we are an interesting lot, aren't we?

Its alright to admit when you have a camera/tech fetish. We all know we do.

I was just thinking of starting a "Beijing Olympics cameras & crew" thread. hehehe. I was constantly pointing out shots that were wobbly, or cool uses of the jib, etc.

And did anyone else notice there were usually 3 or 4 cameras all with the same shot at the Gymnastics venue? And some of the cameras did not look like super high end broadcast? I'm talking like they looked like XL-H1s or some other sub $20K cameras.

Then there was the interesting double crew. One with blue "BOB" vests and one with green vests. I was speculating that the blue BOB crew was NBC and the green was the Chinese national news crew.

And was anyone else supremely annoyed that BNC didn't use many medium or close up shots of the memory town, but instead kept switching to extremely wide angle shots which showed no details of the memory tower? How long can you look at a sea of people not moving (other than swaying back and forth)?

Any way. Thank goodness the olympics are over because now I can get some editing done! That 3-6hr a day TV habit really cuts into productivity.

I recorded most of the telecast's on one of my machines so now I have about 750GB of Olympic coverage. I even have some from the OXYGEN Network's coverage. I have to admit I didn't record it to watch all of the events but to be able to study the camera work.

I too was annoyed at the way NBC shot the closing. I found they were either in too tight or way way too wide. I also heard that they CGI'd in a lot of the fireworks that were around the City in the opening and ending ceremonies. Can anyone confirm this? I found some Youtube videos of "practices" before the opening that had a lot of fireworks going off so I'll have to try to compare the two.

Garrett

How many crews involved?
 

Now I don't know much about it, but had I assumed that most of the TV coverage was being provided by the Chinese, given the number of countries broadcasting the Olympics (let alone the number of channels in each country). Surely there is no way that every broadcasting agency throughout the world could put in a crew to all the big events?

During the Games, I thought I was able to work out what content was being provided by the host county's TV services to the BBC and what the BBC did themselves (trackside interviews, studio commentaries etc). This would explain the somewhat uneven technical standard of what I was watching. Am I completely wrong here?

A fellow student (Norbert) at the Melbourne 5 day Steadicam intensive workshop I did in January scored himself a gig at the Olympics. The cameras they were flying were the Thomson Grass Valley 8000.
More info and pics of his adventures here: SteadicamForum.com - A Community of Motion Picture Camera Stabilization Specialists

Lucky lucky lucky.

It's the luck of steadicam operators to not be seen on TV even though they get a lot of attention when they are working. I'm sure the control room was saying "Get the shot but don't show the steadicam guy" as is their custom.

It's interesting that such an amazing piece of equipment doesn't get more attention. I was just at a school reunion and when I was asked what I do I said "Our company manufactures a camera stabilizer like the steadicam systems used in most movies and TV productions". After five or six seconds of a blank look I have to go into what it looks like and how it works. After a rather lengthy explanation I get another few seconds of... and then they say "That's a.....nice. I decided it would be easier to just say "I'm an accountant or some kind of job everyone knows".

The second night of the reunion I did the video for our class using our rig so it was easy for everyone to know what the heck our company makes.

I was also looking for shots of steadicams being used in the Olympics but saw only short glimpses.

Tery
Indicam