The first season of Extreme E will utilise tech innovations to minimise environmental impact and enable live production from extreme locations.
Extreme E has revealed its innovative production plans and the production partners it’s working with for its live broadcasts.
NEP Group will provide the technology, expertise and global network for Extreme E’s broadcasts, while Aurora Media Worldwide and North One will lead the production of content.
Extreme E has spent 18 months designing the technical solution for its productions, to enable it to reach the most remote locations whilst reducing the environmental impact of the production.
NEP will provide a specialist flypack, designed to survive extreme temperatures and conditions; remote production; crewing; satellite and fibre connectivity; edit and ingest; AR, graphics, display and projection; as well as specialist cameras including RF.
Live feeds from each event will be connected back to NEP’s new UHD-ready centralised Broadcast and Media Centre in London where there will be remote production galleries, remote replay, edit and live monitoring.
Meanwhile, NEP’s Netherlands-based team working with Aurora, North One and Extreme E, has developed new AR tools for drone tracking and in-car graphics. It provides live mapping and overlays of the courses from the drones and promises “a whole new experience in race time GFX AR overlays.”
All the technology for producing the content has been put to the test at the Bentwaters airfield in Ipswich recently, alongside Extreme E’s other broadcast suppliers including Motorsport Communications experts MRTC and specialist timing, telemetry and networks company, Al Kamel Systems.
Simon Moorhead, managing director of NEP UK Broadcast Services, said: “Between designing for Covid restrictions and being mindful of our impact to the environment, we needed to create a workflow that connected limited production crew and equipment on site to remote production hubs while shooting from some of the world’s most remote and difficult locations. All of our teams came together to meet these challenges head on.”
Dave Adey, head of broadcast and technology at Extreme E, added: “After spending months working on these innovative broadcast solutions, many of which have never been used before, it has been great to see them all put into action at our recent test. We are travelling to such remote locations with Extreme E, which means there will be no second chance when we get to site, so this test has proved essential, and seeing all the hard work in real life has been very gratifying. We can’t wait to go racing later this year and show the world Extreme E through one of the most innovative productions I’ve ever worked on.”
Under current plans, the Extreme E five-event calendar starts in March 2021 in Saudi Arabia, before moving to Senegal in May, Greenland in August, Brazil in October and Patagonia in December.