Production crews at Jacksonville (Fla.) Municipal Stadium, home of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars, are using five HL-65W digital broadcasting cameras and one tapeless DNS-33W Editcam3 from Ikegami for nonlinear acquisition.
Each of the Ikegami HL-65Ws is deployed throughout the 67,164-seat stadium to deliver live game-day coverage of the Jaguars and their fans, bringing images to dual 60-×-156-foot JumboTron scoreboards.
"The crispness of our new Ikegami cameras makes our fans' game-day experience that much better," said Adam Lane, Jaguars senior producer. "From our live coverage to preproduced spots and video elements, the increase in clarity has been significant. It has been noticed by everyone from our ticket-holders to the news media."
The upgrade to an all-digital video production plant has also benefited from the integration of the Ikegami DNS-33W Editcam3 camcorder.
"We work on Avids and make heavy use of the 'plug-and-play' functionality," Lane said. "During the week, we use the Editcam3 to shoot our sponsored elements and locker room interviews. Instead of dealing with tape, we simply offload the footage into the Avid and wipe the camera's removable media."
The HL-65W is equipped with DSP ICs that digitize its video signal with 14-bit A/D conversion and up to 38-bit internal processing. Camera settings can be stored to an SD memory card, which simplifies setup. Advanced Interline Transfer CCDs offer high sensitivity of f11 and low smear level of –135dB.
The Editcam3 records either to its hard-drive FieldPak or to solid-state RAMPak media. Current FieldPak capacities go up to 160 GB; RAMPaks at present offer 32 MB but will increase in capacity as solid state recording technology advances. The Editcam 80 GB FieldPak2 can record six hours of DV25 digital video, with DV50 and IMX formats available as options.
