| BUILDINGS & FACILITIES |
YEAR: 1987
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Television viewers were introduced to an innovative visual technique called "Trotcam" at Addington last Saturday. And such was it's popularity, it will be an intergral feature of Television NZ's Inter-Dominion coverage beginning on Saturday week.
Trotcam, a special camera mounted on the back of the mobile gate, was the brainchild of TVNZ senior cameraman Chris Stanbury and sports producer Doug McCammon.
The pictures Trotcam transmitted communicated a true impression of speed and excitement as the competitors swung in behind the mobile arm for the $75,000 TVNZ Mile. We saw Our Mana bumping keenly against the meshed grill, under a strong hold fron trainer/driver Colin De Filippi, and we saw the eventual winner Cinimod Junior lope lazily into his handy front row draw. This was "live" harness racing, not a dead spectacle filmed at medium range from the grandstand.
Stanbury told the Weekly Trotcam had long been an idea he wanted to see used for covering feature harness races, but, until now, technology had been the obstacle. "It's something we've been thinking about for several years - I saw it done at the Brisbane Inter-Dominions last year - but we haven't had the technology to do it. Cameras always needed to have a cable to send signals back to the control van, but now we use a transmitting receiver called a "golden rod" to send the signals through the air."
Stanbury and his workmates modified the utility tray of the mobile, cutting a hole in the roof and mounting the camera. "We were originally going to sit a cameraman on the roof, but it was so high it would have been very unsafe going around the corners," he said.
Permission to use the mobile was quickly given by club officials, the starter and stipendiary stewards, and the TVNZ crew used Addington trials to test the camera. Trotcam will be one of nine cameras TVNZ will have at Addington during the Inter-Dominion carnival, and the ground crew will number at least 30. "We tried a few new ideas (last Saturday) and what you saw was a scaled-down version of what you will see in the Inter-Dominions. It's going to look excellent," Stanbury said.
Credit: Matt Conway writing in HRWeekly 19Feb87