Sony 798 MHz to 822 MHz Brochure page 5

NEWSGATHERING TEAM FRONTLINE TV USES THE
DSR-DU1 HARD DISK RECORDER AS A SECURE BACK-
UP FOR SENSITIVE FOOTAGE
In February 1991 freelance camera operator Vaughan
Smith disguised himself as an army officer and
infiltrated the ranks at the frontline of the Gulf war.
His ingenuity allowed him to film the only unrestricted
footage of Desert Storm.
Much of this material on the ground war is still avail-
able through the ex-BBC cameraman's crewing
agency, Frontline TV, whose team of experienced
freelancers have covered events in Afghanistan,
Israel, Macedonia, Zimbabwe and Iraq. When BBC
Newsgathering approached Frontline recently to
shoot and make several copies of an important and
secret interview, Smith opted for the latest in hard
disk technology.
"All I was told was that a member of Al-Qaeda
wanted to speak to the press. Obviously in these
sorts of circumstances all sorts of people would try
and sabotage the interview or seize a copy to prevent
the footage from being broadcast", he reveals.
To ensure its chances of broadcast, three copies of
the 45-minute interview were made simultaneously
by attaching a DSR-DU1 hard disk recorder – sup-
plied by broadcast distributors Mitcorp – to Smith's
DVCAM camcorder. The DSR-DU1 works by docking
onto the rear of a camcorder by use of an optional
CA-DU1 camera adaptor and then connecting an
i-Link cable from the camcorder to the adaptor.
Camera output is then recorded to the hard drive of
the DSR-DU1 in parallel with the recording on the
camera's tape.
"Through the i-Link interface, the device can also
interface with a variety of hand-held cameras and
has the advantage of increasing recording time from
the 40 minutes of a standard cassette to three hours.
It's a cheap and portable method of making dupli-
cates in the field – the only other way we would
have got multiple copies would have been through
daisy chaining other large recording decks together."
Frontline, whose clients include Channel 4, TV2
Danmark, TV2 Norway, RTE and ABC, also requires
duplicate copies of interviews and events when it is
working in association with more than one broad-
caster. According to Smith, who has been shot twice
during his career, there's another quite simple advan-
tage to making duplicates in this way. "Quite often
soldiers or the authorities will stop you at gunpoint
and try to take your tape off you, but they never both-
er with hard disk recorders because they're trained to
look for tape."
Smith also praises the DSR-DU1 for its useful
function as a back-up when shooting material from
dusty and sandy locations since it tends to be more
robust than tape.
Once the shoot is complete, with the right code the
device can be detached from the camcorder and
used for field off-line logging of EDL creation. And
because it is a fraction of the size of other hard disk
recorders, freelance operators like Smith are able to
take it into the field.
"For the freelance it is a versatile and useful bit of
equipment which is bridging the gap between tape
and the computer", Smith concludes.
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