*Photos supplied by the Seven Olympic Unit – @7olympics, #7Olympics

This month saw the Seven Olympic Unit take over Gravity Media’s Production Centre in Sydney, Australia for their Athlete Profiles for the upcoming Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games and Paralympics.

With two production studios and one photography studio set up at The Production Centre, the Seven Olympic Unit was able to cover all of their requirements with the athletes.

Featuring current Olympic 100m Freestyle Gold Medallist Kyle Chalmers, 4 x100m Freestyle Relay Gold Medallists Bronte and Cate Campbell, three time Paralympics Gold Medallist Dylan Alcott and seven time World Surfing Champion to the new Olympic Sport Stephanie Gilmore the two day shoot was a topic of who from Australia’s sporting talent will be heading to Tokyo next year.

With the Opening Ceremony on Friday 24 July, the clock is now ticking for both the athletes and production teams. Bring on Tokyo 2020!

Following the successful inaugural European Games in Baku in 2015, the second European Games have just concluded in Minsk, Belarus.

More than 4,000 athletes from 50 countries competed across 10 days in 200 different medal events. Of the 15 sports and 23 disciplines, 10 provided qualification for Tokyo 2020, and among the Olympic regulars such as athletics and cycling, athletes were also vying for honours in ‘new’ sports such as beach soccer and sambo.

Gearhouse Broadcast France were heavily involved during the Games, preparing, installing and supporting the IBC media workflow, from ingest to logging, editing and playout. We also supplied a number of slow-motion cameras packages. All in all, 4.5 tonnes of equipment was shipped to the Belarus capital, complete with the Gearhouse Broadcast supporting team.

The Games began on Friday 21^st June, and closed on Sunday 30^th.

7,500 athletes from 190 countries competed across 24 Olympic-style sports at this year’s World Summer Games in Abu Dhabi. The Special Olympics is the world’s largest humanitarian sporting event – part of a global movement that focuses on empowering people with intellectual disabilities through the power of sport. 2019 marks the first time the Games have been hosted in the Middle East since the movement was founded over 50 years ago.

With a singular focus on celebrating the achievements of all the athletes who took part, the special games doesn’t maintain a medals table. In fact, Timothy Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics International, made it clear that the Games were not about medals at all: “It’s about people; it’s not about one nation defeating another nation.” How refreshing.

HyperActive shipped a large consignment of EVS hardware to Abu Dhabi to help NEP cover the event, including two EVS ChannelMAX XT3s with the newly released Multicam 16; four EVS XTAccess; three IPDirectors; two EVS Database Servers; and three EVS Ingest Funnel Lite systems.

Hitachi HD cameras equipped with Gearhouse Actis RF systems provide wireless venue coverage.

Gearhouse Broadcast a worldwide broadcast services specialist, has delivered HD production facilities for the 2014 Asian Games (XVII Asiad), which recently took place in Incheon, South Korea.

Working with Mito, for Incheon Host Broadcasting Management, Gearhouse provided complete coverage with 65 cameras across five venues hosting a number of sports including athletics, cricket and badminton. It also supplied 31 super slow-mo camera channels and 50 specialist and radio cameras, and sent out a 60-strong team of experts to provide on-site technical support.

This is the first major event that Gearhouse has been able to call on the services of its new in-house specialist RF business, Gearhouse Actis, following its acquisition of the respected French company Actis HF, in July 2014 and subsequent rebranding. Through Gearhouse’s unique partnership with Hitachi, the Gearhouse Actis team were able to develop a solution prior to the Games so that the Hitachi SK-HD1200 production camera could be used wirelessly.

“Having Gearhouse Actis on board is a huge help to us both during the build-up to the Asian Games, and while on-site in Incheon,” said Edward Tischler, head of projects at Gearhouse Broadcast. “It proved a valuable resource for my projects team, and our customers at major events in the future. With their expertise on hand, we can now be much more flexible in meeting the usual RF challenges we face at events like this like the inevitable frequency changes.”

With a large amount of equipment returning from this summer’s World Cup in Brazil, Gearhouse shipped a total of 68 tons of kit to South Korea. This included 65 Hitachi cameras, 25 newly upgraded EVS systems, eight Sony MVS vision mixers, as well as multiple Snell routers and Lawo V_pro8 video processors.

Sang Ho Park, president of Mito Corpotation said, “Gearhouse has a proven track record of performing at the biggest events, and has been able to deliver various solutions to meet our broadcast needs, so it was a logical choice for us to work with them. Thanks to its relationship with Hitachi, as well as its new in-house RF offering, Gearhouse Actis, we were able to reduce the number of vendors we had to deal with, which has simplified things from our perspective.”

The Asian Games is a multi-sport event held every four years, hosting 13,000 athletes and officials from 45 Asian nations and around 7,000 media professionals. The XVII Asiad ran from 19 September to 4 October.