Severe location conditions and quality concerns compel the producers of SnowTrax and DirtTrax to go tapeless with the Sony PMW-EX1.

By Iain Stasukevich

DirtTrax TV and SnowTrax TV are Canadian productions airing on various cable stations in Canada and the U.S., and cater specifically towards enthusiasts of the snowmobile and ATV world. Each episode has a little something for everyone: product reviews, new model introductions, test drives, racing results, as well as destinations and travel type segments. "The idea is to not get too technical, so that the casual watcher can get into it," says series producer and host Jeff Steenbakkers.

Until recently, the Trax shows were photographed in standard def with tape-based cameras, notably the Sony DSR570 and the Panasonic SDX-900, the former capturing in DVCAM and the latter in DVCPRO. Episodes have taken place all over North America, from the southwest U.S. to Northern Canada — at different times of the year — and that puts the equipment they use in harshly contrasting weather conditions, which can wreak havoc on the cameras and their delicate, clockwork innards. "Because of the tight production schedule, we have to shoot regardless of weather or temperature," Steenbakkers notes.

For SnowTrax, all of the cameras needed to be serviced, their greases changed to lighter viscosities so the parts will function properly in the sub-freezing temperatures — sometimes as low as -38°C. For DirtTrax — it was just a matter of keeping the dust and the mud and the physical damage to a minimum. Despite every preventative measure taken, picture dropouts and image artifacting were a daily occurrence.
"With SnowTrax, the cold temps don't seem to be as hard on our equipment as the dusty, dirty environments," Steenbakkers says. "After five seasons of SnowTrax the standard-def cameras were pretty much issue-free, not counting the cold weather dropouts. Two seasons of DirtTrax pretty much ruined them."

To solve this problem, Steenbakkers made the decision to switch to a solid-state-capable camera. In he 2008 chose to transition the production of both shows over to the Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1. In doing so, he drastically reduced the aforementioned issues in addition to taking the show high-def, a requirement of many distributors offering HD signals. Also, 35mbits/sec is the minimum bit rate required by Canadian broadcaster The Sports Network for originating HD content.

There were a number of factors influencing Steenbakkers' choice, one of them being the elimination of moving parts; now there's no risk of gears slipping or dirt clogging up the tape heads when the cameras are on location getting knocked around. And when something does go wrong where equipment is damaged, the EX1s are affordable enough to not set the production back financially with expensive replacements or repair costs.

The EX1's compact body also makes it easier to transport in the field, and is less of a physical burden on the cameramen. "I used to watch a lot of our camera operators struggle in the field, but now our efficiency has gone up," Steenbakkers remarks. "Our cameras and accessories are much lighter and easier to transport. The operators have always been pretty diligent and if they had to walk 50 feet off through snow or brush, they'd do it, but now it's easier on them."

As for the switch from tape to solid-state data, he notes, "It was a little bit of a learning curve, using the media cards. Getting cards out of the field, into post, and back into the field was difficult at first."

Postproduction for DirtTrax and SnowTrax is handled by Mike Pollington at Pollington Productions in Ottawa. Depending on who's shooting and when it's being shot, the EX1 SxS cards arrive at Pollington via express mail, FedEx, or they can be hand delivered. Once Pollington imports the footage, Steenbakkers (who is also based out of Ottawa) is usually the one to distribute the cards back to the crews.

Because of the shows' tight budgets, Pollington alone is doing the work of ingesting, backing up, editing, adding titles and effects for, onlining, and exporting 18 episodes of DirtTrax and 13 episodes of SnowTrax per season. He cuts the episodes on a PC-based Avid Media Composer Adrenaline, taking around seven working days to distill about 10 hours of raw content down to around 23 minutes.

Here's how it works: Pollington gets the footage on a Friday, he archives it over weekend, edits for three days, then sends the audio files to Noizemaker Productions in Burlington, ON for mixing, while the offline edit goes out for closed captioning. In the meantime, he's onlining the previous week's show, which takes about a day and a half. It's a grueling schedule. "We've been really lucky that there hasn't been a computer breakdown or a sickness," says Pollington on the phone from his editing bay.

From a postproduction perspective, there are pros and cons to going tapeless. When it arrives at Pollington, getting the footage into the Avid is faster because there's no waiting for it to digitize. In Media Composer, Pollington logs each clip as he edits, eliminating the need for an assistant editor. He even deletes footage.

"The very first couple of times, deleting the footage before I was finished with it was nerve wracking," Pollington recalls. The main issue with tapeless, he says, is that there aren't any tapes to serve as an archive, and backing up the tapeless data takes adds a process to the pipeline. When the cards come in, he transfers the 1920x1080 MPEG4 data to a hard drive on the Avid computer and uses the XDCAM EX Clip Browser to simultaneously transcode it to MXF. Once enough cards have been backed up to the computer, he burns them to a Blu-ray. Despite the extra data management, Pollington appreciates the efficiency of the process. "I've got one binder with two seasons worth of footage for SnowTrax and one season of DirtTrax, where we had whole shelves of tapes before," he says.

Settling into a comfortable tapeless workflow took some work. The shows were two of the first Canadian television shows to exclusively implement the EX1, and at first, Pollington discovered that there was no easy way of getting the camera's 35mbit HDV codec to work in Media Composer (subsequent XDCAM EX Clip Browser updates have since resolved the issue).

"Now the detail that we're getting is quite unbelievable," Pollington enthuses. He edits offline in XDCAM HD and instead of upres-ing, he transcodes the locked cut to DNX145 for the output to HDCAM. The HD masters are re-digitized to create centercut standard-def Betacam SP masters. Web versions of the show are exported from Media Composer as Flash files.

While shooting with the EX1 has streamlined production and taken post to a completely digital realm, it hasn't changed the look of the shows, or how they're edited. "Our style is something we set a number of years ago, and we're still working with a lot of the same camera guys," says Steenbakkers

Pollington agrees. "The editing hasn't been affected, but working in HD is fantastic. As soon as I can take the cards directly into the Avid, then it will be perfect."

DirtTrax can be seen on The Sports Network, Outdoor Life Network, and WildTV in Canada, and The Outdoor Channel in the U.S., while SnowTrax can be seen on those networks, in addition to the Ontario-only A Channel.