14 Sep Vans Downtown Showdown Live Production

With summer well and truly on the way out, what better way to send it off than a trip to Paris to produce and live stream this summer’s Vans Downtown Showdown.

After the success of producing and broadcasting the Vans Spring Classic in Italy in April, we here at 3xScreen Media knew that Downtown Showdown, Europe’s largest skateboarding competition, would need an extensive and professional solution. So we assembled our best production and streaming crew of seven cameramen, two directors, two broadcast engineers, one producer, one graphics operator, and a floor manager and we sent them south across the Channel.

Of course, the foie gras and champagne weren’t the most exciting part of working in the world’s romance capital. In true form, our team was more excited to see how much we could enhance the overall production value of the event with the latest addition to our live production kit.

With a sporting event as dynamic and unpredictable as skateboarding, it was essential that our camera crew be mobile enough not only to follow the fast-paced action but also to be able to get in close and get out of the way quickly too! With this in mind, we acquired the Teradek Bolt. The Bolt is a wireless HD-SDI monitoring system that transmits zero delay uncompressed HD video. This new addition to our camera kit gave our cameramen scope to get amongst the action with ease and minimal disruption to the competitors while capturing some amazing up-close footage.

In conjunction with our usual suit of NewTek production and replay gear, the Teradek Bolt enhanced our existing production capabilities. The end result was comprehensive, professional coverage of the fifth European Downtown Showdown, an event that attracted over 15,000 spectators who came to see the world’s best skateboarders duke it out for €50,000 in prize money – and of course, the glory?