FEATURE Another technical challenge was where to put the correspondents from TV channels all over the world, and how to transmit their interviews with the scientists. Macintyre describes using codec supplied by LiveU “to effectively create a kind of surface to subsea internal audio loop”, bringing the audio from, for example, Sky’s UK studio onto the boat, feeding it into this audio loop and sending it back again. “And then in terms of transmitting the video from the boat, Inmarsat put a couple of tracking antennas from the marine antenna range on the boat, which obviously track with the satellite even if the boat moves, and that has allowed us to do pretty robust communications with very, very little latency.” Macintyre explains that this Inmarsat satellite tracking technology was first deployed in the news industry in the second Gulf War. “At the time we all thought, ‘Wow, that’s groundbreaking.’ And interestingly, the reaction of both people who work for AP and other broadcasters and digital publishers that we’ve been dealing with on this, there’s no sense of wonder anymore about that kind of technology, that’s just taken as bog standard; of course you can get a signal from a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean live. “There has still been a bit of a sense of wonder about how you can do it 100 or 200m down,” he continues. “And I think that’s pushed the boundaries of video creation, as well as these guys pushing the boundaries of science, and in a way that was also part of the attraction - that we want to be pioneering, we want to be in the forefront of trying new things to be better storytellers. And we believed that there was a story to tell that the world needed in a place that nobody’s ever been to before. So that was really from that perspective the perfect marriage.”
maps of the Moon and Mars than we have our own sea bed.’ And we suddenly thought, wow, actually this could really be going to places that nobody’s been to before and seeing things nobody’s seen before and deploying the new technology to do that in real time. This is way too good to turn down. So that’s how we got on board.” THE LIVE AQUATIC Sonardyne then provided the transmitter-receiver setup, which emits LED light from the submersibles to a depresser that trails underneath the mothership. The depresser is lowered as the submersibles get deeper allowing for constant reception, then the picture is sent back to the ship on a cable. “What that’s allowed us to do is obviously get very close up to submerged mountain ranges, get in amongst the coral, and not worry about trailing cables blocking the submarines, which has been quite a different way to tell the story.”
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SURFACE TO AIR The cameras used were a combination of GoPros and Panasonic 270s, as well as those native to the submarines supplied by Teledyne. “We’ve got the ability to put five live cameras into a broadcast at any time, two on each submersible; one facing externally, one facing internally towards the pilot and the scientists,” says Macintyre. “We also had a remotely operated vehicle which is working on a fibre optic cable, which gives us that fifth camera for the wide shots showing what the subs are doing. And then above deck we’ve put in about seven cameras, which are a combination of handheld and remotely operated, to be able to watch the deployment of the subs.” Most of the broadcast was produced in HD, with 10 additional non-live “science cameras” on the sub used to take measurements. “A couple of those are 4K, including one that the guys called “bait cam”, which is a single standalone cable that’s dropped to the ocean bed, has a motion sensor, sits there for about six to 12 hours and any