SVG Europe
article here
After Monte Carlo,
Sweden, Kenya and Croatia, the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC) moves to
Portugal on 9 May for the start of the European gravel phase and promises
spectacle in and around the scenic city of Porto.
As well as being
the biggest sporting event held annually in Portugal, the Rally de Portugal is
ranked as one of the championship’s classic events with challenging stages
including the legendary Fafe jump before the finish. Belgium’s Thierry
Neuville, who drives for Hyundai, heads into the event championship leader.
“Rally de Portugal
is a really big broadcast for us. It’s a spectacular rally and one of our
biggest in terms of on-site audience attendance,” says Florian Ruth, senior
director content & communication at rights holder WRC Promotor.
Difficult stages
This year’s course
is made up of 22 stages, more than any here since 2012, spread across a large
geographic area and reaching a total length of 1,690km. This includes a night
stage in the host city itself around the maze of beautiful streets converging on
the river Douro and the famous Dom Luís metal arch bridge.
This makes the
event logistically complex.
“We have a very
experienced team on the ground and a very good partner with [Portuguese
national broadcaster] RTP with whom we have an excellent relationship to make a
great co-production,” Ruth adds.
On the ground, RTP
is supporting WRC with production facilities particularly for the Porto night
stage. WRC runs four OB vans across the different stages with the live world
feed gallery produced at WRC TV’s production hub in Helsinki managed by
technical production provider NEP Finland.
Aerial coverage is
provided by two helis (one with Cineflex, another carrying Shotover) and a pair
of drones. These are just four of over 100 camera sources. Each of the first 15
cars are fitted with three to four onboards (around 45 onboards in total). These
are bespoke builds developed by NEP for the WRC.
For main stage
coverage feeds from the onboards, heli and some selected ground cameras are
relayed via a relay plane to Helsinki. This isn’t the only connectivity
pathway.
Ruth explains: “We
can send feeds from the OB trucks via the plane and we can send line cuts from
the trucks via satellite and also via LiveU. For example, we transmit all the
live TV stages of the main race on satellite. Then, when the support categories
[WRC2 and WRC3] begin, we switch to RF contribution. In addition, we have a
variety of other camera crew also providing feeds via LiveU. All of RTP’s feeds
are contributed over domestic fibre, managed by Tata Communications.”
In Helsinki, WRC
teams produce the world feed adding commentary, graphics and final mix before
distributing to right holders via fibre, by SRT streams or via satellite.
Races are produced
in full HD encoded in HEVC, still considered by WRC and most leading live
sports producers as a less complex production format than four channels of HD
for 4K UHD.
Capturing the excitement
Editorially, a
chief goal of WRC coverage is to combine the action on the circuit and in the
cars with the excitement of the live event. To do this it selects camera
positions from which it can pan from racing action to emotion in the crowd.
“The stadium stages
of the Rally de Portugal in particular, will focus a lot on the crowd
atmosphere. We expect 30,000-40,000 spectators and we want to see their
emotion,” he adds.
Audio comms between
driver and co-driver is a unique aspect to this motorsport and one which WRC
coverage leans into. A multimedia box installed under the driver’s seat records
driver and co-driver exchanges and transmits them via the plane back to the Helsinki
base. External mics on the car, positioned to pick up the engine as well as the
sound of gravel (rocky or sandy) terrain, are also fed back from the car.
Additional audio is gathered from mics arrayed around the circuit and among
spectators.
Sunday’s decisive
stage will be made up of double passes through the 19.91km of Cabeceiras de
Basto, of which 12.6km are completely new, and the iconic 11.18km of Fafe,
attended by 100,000 people many of whom will have stayed to party overnight.
The hillsides overlooking the sweeping bends that precede it are a magnet for
fans.
“When the first car
comes through, they sing like a football crowd and that is what we want to hear
and transmit,” says Ruth.
In all the team
will produce 22 to 25 hours of live coverage across the four-day event culled
from over 400 hours of total content. That translates to between 15TB and 20TB
of material.
All key footage is
transferred via fibre to the Helsinki hub. There the WRC produces daily
highlights, news packages, digital clips, social media content and assets all
of which lands in a new digital archive system launched in conjunction with
Moments Lab (formerly Newsbridge). This WRC Championship is accessible to
rights holders, broadcasters and sponsors.
DAZN deal
Last August, the
WRC combined its various distribution platforms into Rally.TV, a 24/7 linear
and OTT home of all rally and rallycross events. Its broadcast strategy is to
serve rights holders and grow the audience for the product, which makes a
recent carriage deal with DAZN significant. Rally de Portugal marks the start
of its involvement.
“As our
co-operation with them is just about to start, DAZN first need to learn our
product but we are having good conversations with them and they have some good
ideas. Their editorial teams are very promising and the promotion they will do
for us will help grow the championship,” says Ruth.
Six of the 22
stages of Rally de Portugal are packaged as live TV stages for distribution on
mainstream channels.
“The live TV stages
are where we do wider storytelling, character building and updates as to what
has happened in the rally so far. If you’re not so deep into watching every
moment of every stage we can catch a broader audience,” he adds.
The competition is
a race against the clock rather than head-to-head on the track so the editorial
leans into the personalities of the drivers and in particular the relationship
between driver and co-driver in the cockpit.
“That’s an aspect
we focus on a lot in our storytelling because it sets us apart from every other
motorsport,” Ruth says.
WRC Promoter is
also keen to enrich fan understanding with virtual overlays and time and
section comparisons.
“We are showcasing
the pinnacle of world rally drivers in cars which are so competitive that even
when racing over 20+km to the limit the difference between them at the end is
just tenths of a second,” Ruth says. “We are trying more and more to visualise
the differences. Every millimetre and every centimetre on every turn counts and
we are trying with digital enhancements to make this more and more visible to
the viewer.”
Remote production
Production moved to
a remote model in 2022 and it is proving successful on several levels, one of
which is improved sustainability.
Ruth says the WRC
is conscious that its CO2 footprint is being monitored and that its remote
production has already had a substantive positive impact.
“Simply in terms of
plane travel there’s a lot less people and freight we have to fly. We have
reduced our emissions a lot”, he reveals.
There is, of
course, a cost benefit in not transporting all the facilities and people to
every location but one plus “more important than cost efficiency” is production
resiliency, according to Ruth. To produce a rally in the middle of a safari
park live from Helsinki was an ambition WRC had long wanted to achieve, Ruth
says, and it was achieved for the first time last year with the WRC Safari
Rally Kenya, and successfully repeated this year.
“The first year we
travelled to Kenya the production facilities suffered. It’s not only Kenya.
Mexico too. The more you rig in remote locations the greater the risk of
failure,” he explains.
Driving on bumpy
roads tended to loosen screws in gear, EVS kit needed dedusting of sand, 40º
heat doesn’t help either.
Now, with all the
essential production parts moved offsite there is less need to cable everything
and less need to check and double check. He continues: “There always the chance
of a broken connector on-site so to remove all that risk and be in a very stable
environment where everything is perfectly connected and tested in a
state-of-the-art IP production hub makes a big difference.”
Looking ahead, in
June the WRC is returning to Poland, a country with a strong fanbase (it lost
its place on the calendar due to repeated breaches of spectator safety) and
it’s launching a new rally in Latvia in July.
There’s also WRC
Finland in August “our Monaco Grand Prix”, Ruth says, “one of the most
prestigious on the calendar”. Indeed, some of the most spectacular rallies in
terms of landscape are still to come, with teams set to race at high altitude
in Chile before the season finale in Japan, home of reigning World Champions
Toyota Gazoo Racing and one of their two full-time drivers, Takamoto Katsuta.
No comments:
Post a Comment