ROBOVISION CAMERAS When a shot would be too dangerous for a cameraman,
broadcasters turn to Robovision cameras. A remote- controlled camera, the “robo” is responsible for those familiar shots of cars whipping past the camera. Robos can pan (rotate on the horizontal axis) and zoom and are engineered to do so quickly enough to keep up with the speeding cars. At Indy, ESPN placed 10 robos around the track. In
addition to the familiar places along the wall, two were mounted on the wall that separates pit road from the frontstretch.
ICONIX In the Craftsman Tech Garage, ESPN relies on a
tiny camera approximately the size of a tube of lipstick to give viewers a close-up look at the inner workings of a Cup car. Mounted on a counterweighted boom known as
a jib, the camera operator is able to drop it in hard- to-reach places in the cutaway cars to give fans an extreme close-up of the demo vehicle. “When Tim [Brewer] shows a broken connecting rod, the camera can get right in there,” Cook says.
WIRELESS RF CAMERA All stationary cameras feed their signal to the production facility through fiber-optic
cable. At Indy, approximately 20 miles of video, audio and power cable were laid down to connect the far-flung cameras to the TV compound. But pit reporter crews who need to be mobile rely on wireless RF cameras. Each of the five RF cameras requires a two-man crew — the cameraman and a
“pointer.” The pointer carries an antenna mounted on a pole and makes sure that it is pointed at one of many receiving antennae mounted along the frontstretch. They bounce the signal from the camera to the mounted antenna, which then feeds the signal through cable to the TV compound. A third crewman also carries a small monitor mounted on a pole to show the crew the broadcast feed or, frequently, to show drivers replays of incidents on the track.
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