Window Seat Pictures Documents the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing Window Seat Pictures of El Segundo California recently shot four one-hour programs documenting the celebrated Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. The Vans Triple Crown of Surfing is a Hawaiian specialty series of professional surfing events all staged on the North Shore of Oahu a coastline world-famous in surfing circles for its clockwork winter swells that reach 50 feet in height. The Vans Triple Crown second in prestige only to surfing's world title is considered the ultimate test of a surfer's ability to master the big waves at three unique and challenging venues: Haleiwa Ali'i Beach Park Sunset Beach and the Banzai Pipeline. Window Seat Pictures a production company specializing in action sports programming numbers Vans shoes Monster Energy Drink General Mills Mattel Anheuser-Busch Fox Sports NBC and CBS among its clients. For the past several years Window Seat has shot award-winning campaigns featuring snowboarding skateboarding and other action sports with Panasonic HVX200s (the company owns three) occasionally renting an HPX500 for long-lens work. Last fall Window Seat purchased two HPX170s specifically for the seven-week Vans Triple Crown shoot. “As crucial as the HVX200s have been to our signature shooting style we were eager to invest in the HPX170s ” says Window Seat executive producer Moz Mirbaba. “With no tape drive the HPX170 is significantly lighter an obvious plus for our type of work. The camera has an improved sensor which means a lower noise floor and better light sensitivity key advantages to our cinema verite shooting where so many events are spontaneous with unpredictable lighting conditions.” Window Seat took seven P2 HD camcorders on the Vans Triple Crown assignment: four HVX200s two HPX170s and an HPX500 the last rented from EVS of Glendale California. The HPX170s were the main interview cameras the HVX200s outfitted with Century Optics doublers were the chief surfing cameras (with shooters in Jet skis operated by the Hawaiian Water Patrol capturing footage of the competitors as well as free surfers) and the HPX500 was used as the master contest camera shooting the master shots (sunsets huge waves) with long lenses that could see a quarter mile out into the ocean. “The Triple Crown is the ultimate testimonial to the advantages of P2 solid-state shooting ” Mirbaba says. “We experienced more than 40 days of humidity rain and extreme heat with not one camera failure. The HPX170 exceeded our expectations. A director and DP were each equipped with an HPX170 and while waiting out the perfect surfing conditions for the competitions they would bicycle with the cameras all over the North Shore to shoot interviews with surfers and locals as well as capture general lifestyle coverage. As we’d anticipated the results are exceptionally cinematic.” “We outfitted the HPX170s with the new Redrock M2 cinema lens adapter for 35mm lenses and it worked superbly with the cameras ” says Matt Devino Window Seat’s lead editor on the Triple Crown shoot. “A simple switch changes the focus ring to iris; the camcorder doesn’t de-focus which mean set-ups are a lot faster.” Window Seat had 30 32GB P2 cards on location in Hawaii. The production elected to recycle cards out one at a time as soon as they were at capacity. “We had assistant editors and media managers on site to offload material ” says Devino. “Each camera was assigned to a PowerBook G4; each G4 had two FireWire drives attached to it for double back-up of footage. We created QuickTime files on one of the back-up drives and sent the second drive back to Los Angeles where it was backed-up on our server as a triple safety.” Since all four Triple Crown programs were scheduled to air in first quarter 2009 post-production had to be initiated immediately. Window Seat set up two MacPro Eight Core workstations on the island and ran five Eight Core machines back at its Los Angeles office all tied into a SAN server. Color correction and the final master lay-offs are being handled at an outside post facility. Material is archived on mirrored SATA drives stored on-and off-site. “Beyond the P2 HD camcorders’ portability coupled with compelling image quality the price point of these cameras is significant ” says Mirbaba. “Panasonic has made it affordable for an independent production company such as ours to transition to HD. Our clients want the look and feel of HD in their projects and with our P2 HD cameras we can do that for not much more than the cost of standard-def acquisition.” The shows aired on Fuel TV and will appear on Voom’s Rush HD network. Prior to the production team’s departure for Hawaii Window Seat utilized the HPX170s to shoot a web campaign promoting a user-generated video contest for General Mills’ Totino’s Party Pizza brand. The You Tube-centric campaign starring Olympic snowboarder Danny Kass was among the top 100 trafficked videos in You Tube history. Next up for the HPX170s is a web campaign to launch a new Mattel toy product. Panasonic www.panasonic.com/P2HD Window Seat Pictures www.windowseatpictures.com
