Unlike a lot of annual FOX Sports productions, the first Freedom 250 INDYCAR Grand Prix did not have a task list from previous years to call upon during production planning. A first-time event doesn’t come with the luxuries of knowing a venue layout, or what sort of process worked well last time.
So we might have… overpacked.
HDR From Beginning to End
When CMSI first received the call for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, it was a new event for IMSP and FOX, too. Without an established workflow from previous years to build upon, our team prepared for a wide range of possibilities and brought more hardware than we ultimately needed. That preparation gave the production room to adapt if circumstances changed, without forcing the team to solve preventable problems in the middle of the show.
While some of that extra hardware got an unexpectedly relaxing weekend, one of the production’s biggest technical highlights was working in HDR throughout the entire workflow.
The Freedom 250 Grand Prix remained HDR from ENG acquisition through the finished edit, maintaining the format as content moved through the production and post-production process.
Maintaining HDR throughout a workflow requires more than simply capturing an HDR image. The media needs to remain consistent as it moves between acquisition, editing, and delivery, particularly when the people working with that content aren’t all sitting in the same place.
One Production, Three Editing Environments
The editing operation for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix stretched well beyond the event site.
IMSP editors worked onsite, while FOX editors supported the production from Los Angeles. Meanwhile, FOX’s weekly editor was cutting from home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
CMSI helped support the infrastructure behind that distributed operation, giving editors the resources they needed to work with content regardless of where their edit system happened to be.
Preparing for the Show
Despite the unknowns that come with a first time event, our team came prepared with everything required to make the production run smoothly.
Luckily for CMSI, the success of a production is measured by the smoothness of the workflow rather than exactly how many hardshell shipping cases are lugged across the country. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what we tell ourselves while we pack it all up.
