Choices
Those properties began with the team’s website — a league leader in all things digital and video — and our window to the world for the 49ers Faithful, our global fan base. Next, content would be created for two new television broadcasts that will debut in September of 2014, Forty Niners Way and The Faithful. Lastly, and perhaps most visibly, content was needed for 1.4 billion dollar, Levi’s Stadium, the future home of the 49ers. The stadium, set to open in 2014, is widely touted as the most technologically sound stadium on the planet. It also boasts two of the largest outdoor boards in the NFL and will host events above and beyond just 49ers games; Super Bowl L and Wrestlemania 31 to name a few. These three entities call for exceptional production with versatile and dependable gear that my team could grow with. There was one simple choice for the franchise and that was to work with Sony Cameras and make Sony the bulk of our hardware as well. 145
With the commitment from Sony to make the purchases work beyond expectation for the 49ers, our new production workflow was born. Sony’s F55 4K cameras were the cameras of choice (we initially purchased three) and, prior to the 2013 football season, we would be one of the pioneers in North American professional sports to take this plunge. The extreme versatility of the cameras afforded my producers and editors to shoot in multiple formats of HD, gorgeous slow motion, 4K internally (at 10-bit) or 4K RAW externally (at 16-bit), and even 4K XAVC and 1080p simultaneously to the same SxS card. This allowed us to immediately use 1080p footage off of the SxS cards while also recording 4K for archive purposes, flexibility in post, and future-proofing. Our goal is to eventually move exclusively into the 4K world of post production, but the opportunity to work without stoppage while game planning for such lofty goals was a blessing.