EditShare Takes Ride With World Surf League

With the help of three EditShare Field 2 units, the World Surf League (WSL) covers 21 professional surfing events annually, with its production team delivering on-the-scene, live broadcasts of the world’s most talented surfers along with pre- and post-show coverage at WorldSurfLeague.com.

“Even when we’re in places like San Clemente, CA, we’re down on the beach with little to no infrastructure, no power, no connectivity. You bring everything with you including the Field 2,” comments Rob Hemmer, VP of post-production, World Surf League. “We usually have six editors accessing a single Field 2 unit, so there might be two or three people editing features at the same time that others are doing highlights or handling newsfeeds. EditShare’s project sharing is key for these situations as it allows everyone to view the evolution of the content for various spots and programs.“

The EditShare Field 2’s rugged, compact design meets the stringent airline regulations for carry-on baggage and offers the standard features of its storage siblings, including RAID-protected hardware and advanced project sharing for Avid, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Lightworks editors.

Each WSL Field 2 unit is outfitted with SDI cards for managing centralized, multi-channel ingest. Live footage is acquired by Grass Valley cameras and specialized RF-controlled camera rigs developed specifically for capturing water-based action. Offline WSL specialty shooters, equipped primarily with RED Epic DRAGON 6K cameras and supplemented by GoPro cameras, capture archival footage for features and promos. Adding another piece to the mix, Blackmagic Design Production 4K cameras are also occasionally employed for seated interviews and other off-beach moments set in a studio environment.

For pre-recorded shows, camera footage is offloaded to Blackmagic HyperDeck recorders and then ingested into one of the WSL’s three EditShare Field 2 units. The EditShare Field 2 is configured with the EditShare Flow Media Asset Management ingest application and Field HD/SD-SDI cards to facilitate multi-channel baseband recordings. For live broadcasts, clipped material is ingested to the EditShare Field units via EVS media servers. The Flow Browse interface allows users to view raw clips and preview live video streams, select codecs and wrappers for ingest, and even provide initial metadata for live feeds, while Flow’s ‘edit-while-capture’ capabilities enable editors to start cutting as soon as ingest begins. With support for a wide range of camera formats, the WSL team relies on the Flow MAM application to provide centralized ingest and proxy generation, allowing editors, producers and other production professionals instant access to files.