Jetboating Cameras

[JetB]

Hi I don't know if anyone can help but lets have a go anyway, if not can anyone please point me in the right direction.

We have a jetboating company on the Gold Coast (Australia).
We currently have 3 boats and will be getting our fourth in the near future.

Here is what we want to do.
We want two video cameras on each of the boats, one at the back facing forward looking at the view from the customers perspective. The second camera will be at the front of the boat facing backwards looking at the customers and catching their reactions when we spin the boat etc.

We want the driver to be able to switch the recording between to two cameras but all content to be in one place.
We would like this footage added in the middle of some pre existing footage and preferably some kind of watermark or logo on the video.

Once the boat returns and customers are getting off the boat the footage would be finished and edited and only require putting onto a USB drive. The distance from the boats to the office computers is about 30metres, could we copy the data via cable to USB drives fast or is there a wireless option that would be fast and reliable enough.

Is any of this possible?
what would we need? etc etc etc. Please help.


Oh and it all needs to be waterproof.

Dave

[Dave]

Firstly, I'm not really an adventure videographer. Ideally you'd want to talk to someone with experience shooting on boats but I'm afraid I don't know anyone who could help. I was really hoping someone else would reply to this but it doesn't look like anyone wants to touch it! So FWIW here's my opinion...

The easiest part of all this would be waterproofing the cameras. You may already have that sorted out, but basically you need to buy waterproof housings for them. That's fairly standard except for one thing - these housings aren't designed to accommodate the extra equipment or cables you'd need to link two cameras together. Still, it's possible to work around that with some customization.

As for the real-time editing and simultaneous watermark whilst riding in an adventure jetboat? Holy cow. I've never heard of anything like it. I'm always up for a technical challenge but quite frankly I think this would be more than I'd be willing to try. There are a lot of serious obstacles to overcome and it's going to be very expensive to set up.

Somehow you're going to need to:
- Feed both camera sources into a video switcher and then a recorder, either with cables or wireless transmitters.
- If you want audio (and you probably do), have a separate mic feeding audio to the recording device.
- Get the watermark onto the recorder at the same time. Some recording devices have this capability built-in, but more likely it will need to come from either the switcher or a separate source.
- Put all this in the middle of pre-recorded footage. I can see how you might be able to record the first part of the pre-record to the recording device, then add the live part, but then you still need to add the last part of the pre-record. I don't see any practical way to do this.
- Somehow waterproof all this equipment while still making it usable. I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf equipment that is designed to edit like this in a wet environment although I guess such a kit might exist.

Even if you were able to edit in the boat, getting the finished product transmitted and ready for viewing in the time it takes to walk 30 metres is another very difficult hurdle.

This would be dramatically easier if you could just record the two separate cameras and edit them when you get back. Honestly, I'd be seriously considering some sort of compromise. Perhaps you could show the customers one of the camera angles while the editing is being done?

[HCCAVTechnician]

If you get all the equipment issues worked out for on the boat... (I've done live production before, but NOTHING like this! LOL!)

Back at the dock, you could use some kind of media player device (like the Roland P-10 http://www.roland.com/products/en/P-10/) to load in an SD card of the ride. You could then have the opening and closing clips pre-loaded on the device. Connect all of this to a stand-alone DVD recorder (onto pre-printed DVD media) and run the videos real time from the presenation device. Finalization and duplication would be your final steps.

Good luck and let all of us know your progress. I'm thinking of taking a jet boat ride at the Wisconsin Dells in a few weeks. I'll see if they offer video recordings of their rides and report back how they do it.

Mike Gunderson
Freeport, Illinois