CLOUD CHASERS Sony Professional Europe’s Virtual Production service recently helped Red Bull stream the annual Alpenbrevet motorcycle race live from the Swiss mountains. Colby Ramsey headed to Sarnen to find out how the new cloud-based solution can take content creators beyond the restrictions of physical production infrastructure
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p to now, high quality and reliable live production has notoriously required significant infrastructure, major financial investment and a plethora of trained technical staff. Enter Virtual Production. The Red Bull Alpenbrevet motorcycle race in Sarnen, Switzerland recently provided the perfect opportunity for Sony to showcase this new ondemand cloud production service, which aims to provide a complete production toolset for multi-platform content creation and delivery. At the one-day event, Red Bull Switzerland used Virtual Production’s cloud-based services and 4G connectivity to capture and broadcast the entire race to its social media platforms using a limited number of camcorders and a single laptop to operate the Virtual Switcher GUI. “I heard about Virtual Production last year at the Locarno Festival and straight away we started thinking about opportunities where we can use this product, so we got in contact,” says Red Bull Switzerland production
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manager Hubert Zaech. The Alpenbrevet has grown in terms of the amount of participants every year since its inception in 2010: “Some are hardcore and some are first-timers but the goal is simply to have fun and enjoy the weekend,” Zaech adds. “It’s important to note however that it is not a race because motor racing itself has traditionally been banned in Switzerland. Instead it is a tour, with no real winner, while prizes are awarded to the teams with the fastest times and whackiest appearances.” The Alpenbrevet event has become an important date in the calendars of casual motorcycle racers across Switzerland and Europe. While the scenic route of the race is a big draw for participants, it poses significant challenges for production teams, and so Sony’s Virtual Production proved to be the perfect solution for the event. It provided the Red Bull team with the freedom, mobility and agility to capture and distribute content quickly, without having to deal with the logistical nightmare of installing physical infrastructure in a