Sidepodcast

McLaren Reveal 2010 Chassis and Livery

Friday saw the McLaren team launch their 2010 F1 challenger during a ceremony at the Vodafone Headquarters in Newbury, UK. The covers were pulled back on the MP4-25 by drivers Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton.

Credit: mclaren.com

A side view of McLaren's elongated 2010 silver machine, the MP4-25.

The event began at 11:00 GMT and was successfully broadcast live to the internet in its entirety. The car again featured a silver livery not wildly differing from last year, while the chassis was notable for its extended 'shark-fin' engine cover. The underside of the nose features an unusual arrangement of turning vanes that should help direct airflow to the tightly packaged sidepod intakes.

The team's official press release described the revised bodywork as a "radical aerodynamic overhaul" and was keen to stress the importance of the ongoing relationship with engine partners, and now on track rivals, Mercedes.

Horsepower once again comes from our friends in Stuttgart. Mercedes-Benz's FO 108X V8 subtly improves upon an engine which has become the benchmark in Formula 1, winning the last two drivers' world championships.

Credit: mclaren.com

The MP4-25 front and center, featuring Jenson Button's number one atop the nose.

New team member, Jenson Button was ecstatic to see his world champion's number one displayed on the nosecone for the first time.

"I’m incredibly proud to be standing here today knowing I'll be carrying the number one for the whole season: that's a great responsibility but also a great honour. It's something I’m relishing. It looks so cool too!"

"I've got a great team around me, and I already feel very at home here. I just can't wait to get in the car and start driving again. It really can’t come soon enough!"

Meanwhile, team mate Lewis Hamilton spoke of his faith in the team's strength in depth.

"We have a tremendous engineering team – people who have been here for many, many years and who have worked with some of the sport’s greatest champions and helped design and build some of Formula 1's most iconic cars. They really want to deliver another fantastic car for the 2010 season."

The car will run for the first time during testing in Valencia on Monday.

Mercedes-Benz F1 Livery Launch Replay

The battle for the most interactive F1 launch appears to be well and truly and on. This morning Ferrari announced they will be broadcasting the launch of their 2010 Formula 1 car online on Thursday, while McLaren have created a special microsite for their own announcement later this week.

In the meantime, current multimedia forerunners Mercedes have published a replay of their live streaming launch video. The whole show is almost 22 minutes in length, highlights some slightly dodgy lighting and the first half of the video features a German language soundtrack. If you missed it the first time though, and didn't manage to catch the debut of Nico Rosberg and Michael Schumacher in their 2010 outfits, this is worth watching.

Let's hope that the remaining F1 teams step up and offer fans a similar service for each of the remaining events.

Video Nearly Killed the Radio Star

Somewhere between the time we started Sidepodcast and present day, we manage to attract some fantastically creative individuals to the community here, and those people never cease to come up with endless amounts of brilliant ideas and together solve all sorts of unimaginably complicated problems. Those same people also ask a lot of questions.

Credit: Sidepodcast

Christine... on the Internet

Last week Christine and I, under the guise of F1 Minute, launched a short video trial, investigating into how the current F1 Minute audio podcast might translate to the small screen. It's a challenging problem to solve, because video production typically takes considerably more effort than audio production and Christine already manages to fill every waking hour with audio work. How in the world can an order of magnitude more work be squeezed into that same timeframe too?

The simple answer is, it can't.

This didn't come as a massive surprise, given we attempted to bring F1 Minute video to life at the beginning of 2008 before the real world got the better of us. Last week's trial almost slipped through our fingers too, had mother nature not kindly intervened and given us a couple of snow days to catch up with ourselves. We're ambitious, but ultimately held to account by the same invisible force as everyone else.

In a typically Sidepodcast fashion, we made and launched our video trial without any preconceptions or expectations. The shows could've been a worldwide smash hit, or they could've vanished without a trace. We were only really interested in figuring out how long each one took to make, assuming it was possible at all.

Then questions came from the smart people and we couldn't answer them. We didn't know how long we were planning to make them for. We didn't know when they would be available. We didn't even have a logo prepared should someone wish to plug the show.

You'd never guess we'd been doing this for three years already.

Now though, we are slightly smarter after the fact. We know roughly where we are, what we can do, and where we might be going... sort of. We know that making a daily 60 second video on the subject of F1 is possible, and that given the right finances they can be made mostly by one person on a part time basis. We also know we have most of the right equipment, but that a laptop really isn't the correct machine for the job.

Clearly we now know the initial run of shows would only last for five days although we probably assumed it would be more. We also know that there are other options to explore and that we're not done experimenting yet.

As discussed on the F1 Minute blog HD video is a priority, so to is optimising a tardy workflow. It's been requested that Christine feature more throughout each show, and while we originally filmed just the top and tail of the programme, a better model would likely look similar to F1 Rewind from days of yore (except in shorter form).

Looking around for the competition, only Autosport's autoplaying video channel appears to offer anything of a similar nature, and you'll need a magnifying glass to see that. GP Update have the occasional stab at video production, and Eurosport appear to occasionally put some F1 news content online. There really isn't anyone else out there doing something along these lines, and that's the main reason we wanted to have a go.

At it's current level the series isn't sustainable without an income. How we find an income stream for it is a problem for another day, in the meantime we have more to do and more to learn. Expect more F1 Minute video before the season begins.

If you had any thoughts, ideas, suggestions and questions this past week, now is a good time to throw them out there.

Do You See What I See?

I've got to be honest, when I read a suggestion on Ed Gorman's blog today, that there was a chance some additional Fuji footage might work it's way online via official channels, my response was one of marked cynicism.

But all due credit to the powers that be, because as Dom spotted earlier, Bernie's official site is now carrying raw video footage from the various incidents that drew so much response during the Grand Prix of Japan.

For the very first time in Formula 1's history, you may legally watch a "commentary free" selection of racing incidents via your web browser, from anywhere in the world.

Looking at the page in question, it would appear that either this was a bit of a last minute rush-job, or someone did this begrudgingly. The page looks half finished. It's missing a preview image, features no descriptive text and simply asks the question:

Japanese Grand Prix footage - what do you think?

When played, the video actually offers little new information of note, and doesn't change my opinion on any conclusions we'd already come to. What I am curious about though, is the reason for this contents sudden appearance.

The material could quite conceivably have been slotted into the site's regular post-race promo video without raising any eyebrows, but seeing as the video is accompanied by a rhetorical question, we must assume that somebody is trying to make a bigger deal out of this.

Is this simply Formula One Management picking a good time to score some decent PR points? Is someone unhappy with the way the stewards have been acting recently, or is it an attempt to offer a tiny morsel of transparency from within a usually oblique system? Also, does this set a precedent that says we can now expect all future questionable incidents to be made available for perusal?

There's a lot to be discussed from this move, but what we do know for certain is that Fuji brings out the best in F1 video. It was just over a year ago that stewards first relied on video evidence supplied via YouTube to help make a call relating to a racing incident. The footage came from the Fuji Speedway and in fact the source used was none other than Mr. Gorman's blog.

Ancillary F1 - RTV

• Length: 3:10 
• Size: 3.0 MB 
• File: ancillary7.mp3 
• Transcript: ancillary7.pdf 
• Torrent: ancillary7.torrent 

Welcome to the last episode in the mini series Ancillary F1, where we take a look at the supportive companies involved with the sport, those not directly competing. Today we’re looking at television production house RTV.

RTV GmbH was founded in 1995 by Oliver Bauss in Stuttgart. He had been working for the German TV company RTL, who had the F1 rights at the time, and Bauss was a motorsport fan in his own right. With an interest in racing, he soon realised there was a gap in the market for behind the scenes broadcast footage, and he setup RTV.

The company’s first partner was Allianz, who sponsor Williams, and their first commission was to produce a series of programmes about how F1 has helped to improve passenger safety in road cars.

Their clientele, and capabilities improved over the years and now they broadcast a wide range of Formula 1 related packages. They are probably best known for Inside Grand Prix, which is a half hour programme, covering technical information, historical pieces, behind the scenes footage and personnel profiles. The programme has been running since 2001 and is currently broadcast in 55 countries across the world.

There’s a lot more to RTV than a thirty minute television show though. No doubt you’ve seen those promotional films that teams make when they’re launching a new car or driver lineup. It usually involves a lot of chasing around a track, and can include slow motion and close ups and other special effects. RTV make a lot of these, and have invested heavily in the equipment to do this. They have access to specialist helicopters for overhead shots, tracking vehicles for smooth filming, customised rigs for those hard to reach places and super-slow-mo cameras for… super-slo-mo filming. RTV plan the entire production, from storyboarding, through video capture and the editorial process, and the end results can be stunning.

One of the most interesting things RTV can offer is what is known as the bullet-time effect, or as you and I know it - that cool thing they did in The Matrix. A long line of photographic cameras, over 30 sometimes, capture images within split seconds of each other, and the resulting pictures can be used to capture many angles of the same shot enabling a director to pan around a seemingly frozen image.

The company use their many talents to cover press-conferences, car launches, testing, breaking news, sponsor films, as well as branching out to other series like DTM and Le Mans. The reason we like them so much is for their forward looking internet presence. Rights free material in various formats, and multiple languages, covering different motorsports and topics, available to download. This is something Bernie Ecclestone could only dream about.

That’s it for this episode and this series. I’d love to know if you’ve seen any of RTV’s coverage and what you think of it, please leave your comments on Sidepodcast.com, or on the voicemail 0121 28 87225. Look forward to hearing from you.

Theme music: Porter Block, Second Wind.

Going Live!

It's that time again, live streaming comes to Sidepodcast HQ for the second time.

Now, I should preface this post by saying we're not going to do an entry every time we are record the video. The idea is to set up a 'Live' page and give the streaming TV it's own space. You can keep your eye on the schedule to see when we're planning to record.

The reason for this blog post, then, (aside from the fact that we haven't set up the page yet) is that there are changes afoot.

As a bit of a test, we're moving from UStream.tv to Justin.tv. Personally, I think UStream is a great site, and I'm already missing it, but Justin.tv offers a lot more options. The kind of thing that the techy one gets excited about. So here's Sidepodcast how Justin see's it.

Inside Track Live is due to start any moment now, so stay tuned (if you can tear yourself away from Le Mans) and I'll see you in two!

The Magic of Chroma Key (Part 2)

In part 1 of our behind-the-scenes look at chroma keying, we covered humble beginnings and the nightmare's encountered therein. In part 2, let's look at how we solved some of the issues while creating ourselves some brand new ones.

Going Pro

We struggled on with the duvet cover for as long as we could (ironing it actually made a significant difference) but the truth is, it just wasn't good enough. We made a total of 13 videos before giving in and purchasing a professional green / blue screen.

The new backdrop made its debut on the Italy preview show and the results were instantly impressive. The screen folds away inside a soft bag which means some creases are still apparent, but when opened it remains flat and is very luminous in colour, making post-processing a relative breeze.

On one side you get green material while the reverse is blue, meaning that if Christine decides to wear clothes of similar shade to the former, we simply flip the thing around. Life's so much easier with the right tools isn't it?

Why Do You Have to Go and Make Things So Complicated?

After a couple more straightforward videos we decided to try something a bit different, so during the off-season we made the Christmas Message video, which was particularly complicated because it was the first shoot we'd done with the host seated.

The newly acquired backdrop is 5ft by 7ft which is plenty big enough to film a large chair and its occupant, but we suffer from severe space restrictions meaning that all of the furniture had to be removed from the room just to get the video camera far enough away.

The shoot took two days meaning that the room was out of bounds during that period and seeing as some of the removed furniture included the bed, it meant sleeping in the living room until we were done. Oh yes, that's how dedicated to the Sidepodcast cause we are. First we can't sleep because the duvet cover's hanging upright on the wall, and when we solve that problem, the bed leaves the room.

Camera Obscura

You may have noticed by now that Christine doesn't appear to have any legs or feet in the videos and that's purely down to problems with space. While the backdrop is willing and able, there's simply no way we can move the camera enough distance away to fit a whole person in the viewfinder. For the time being we're simply limited to half a person, whether they be sitting or standing.

One final thing to mention is that for the last two F1 Rewind show's, we didn't use chroma technology at all. We simply hung a plain backdrop from the ceiling and pointed a couple of pretty lights at the thing. The result means much less post processing work and that's something we're going to look more into in the future because backgrounds are taking us much longer this year.

In the past we spent a small fortune buying various images and movies from iStockphoto, this year we decided to make our own. How we've gone about doing that though, is a story for another day.

Any comments or questions on either of these two posts, please do shout us in the comments. We are all ears, and quite worryingly, are always here.

The Magic of Chroma Key (Part 1)

Seeing as there's a brief lull in the racing action at the moment, we might just be able to squeeze in a quick behind the scenes look at green screen technology. I should declare upfront that this post isn't remotely related to Formula 1, but a couple of people have expressed an interest in the inner workings of Sidepodcast, so please excuse the self indulgence.

The Early Years

The idea of keying out a single colour from a piece of film has been around since the 1930's. The principle is simple, pick a solid colour as a backdrop, ensure that it's not present in the foreground and then replace said colour with other footage during post-production. The techniques for doing this have dramatically improved in the last 70-odd years (while costs have drastically reduced), but the original concept remains the same.

Chroma keying is used in all forms of video production nowadays, the local weather programme is the most commonly seen example, but given its relatively low cost, there's little reason not to make some use of the technology.

That's Me in the Spotlight

Although we essentially have no knowledge of television production, when we started making videos it was pretty clear that chroma keying was a great way to turn a very small space into a larger one, and as all we had was a small space, it was worth looking into.

The first two videos we ever made for Sidepodcast didn't involve keying at all. Episode one didn't have a presenter while the second was filmed on-location. In the process of making these two short films, we purchased a copy of Final Cut Express, and hidden within its menu system was a tantalising option entitled 'Blue and Green Screen'.

Having the software was all well and good, of course, but to get started you need to own a coloured screen and we didn't have one. Neither did we have the budget to buy one. What we did have though was a blue duvet cover... so we used that instead.

As you can probably tell, the early days were quite stressful. Apart from the fact we were making everything up as we went along, it turns out that certain blues are easier to key than others, even light is important and wrinkles in the background sheet can be troublesome. Oh yeah, and remember the principle rule of chroma keying? Ensure that the background colour is not present in the foreground!

The picture above tells a sorry story. It wouldn't be possible to create a worse keying set than the one we managed to even if you were doing so on purpose. Yes an iron wouldn't have gone amiss, yes more lights were required and yes the collar on Christine's top is blue. What of it?

Saving Grace

All was not lost though, because technology is a wonderful thing, and with a lot of tweaking we managed to fashion something out of what we had. The final edit can be seen in last year's Bahrain preview. It helps that the video isn't very big, but you can clearly see that the once blue collar is now a peculiar shade of green, and there's a funny aura around the girl where rough edges were over-softened to remove troublesome artifacts.

That seems like a pretty good place to end the first part of the Sidepodcast chroma key story. In part 2 we'll look at how things improved once we bought ourselves a decent curtain.

F1 Rewind #2

• Length: 04:22 
• Size: 45.9 MB 
• File: rewind2.m4v 
• Transcript: rewind2.pdf 
• Torrent: rewind2.torrent 

It feels like all we've done for the past two weeks is talk about races and racing, so for this episode of F1 Rewind we take a look at what's been happening away from the circuit.

News

Nico Rosberg talks about his helmet design featured on that plane. Kazuki Nakajima talks about not having his helmet design featured on any plane. And Christine looks into a possible source of Jarno Trulli's recent mood swings.

Team Talk

A timely reminder about F1 Digest, because we had to mention the racing at some point.

F1 on the Web

Featuring a different website each week to build up a directory of useful F1 bookmarks, this week Christine takes a closer look at F1 Wolf, in particular the photos from the Australian Grand Prix and the incredibly useful Engine Statistics chart.

We're looking for nominations for other sites to feature, especially if they're relatively new or unknown. Please leave details, along with any other feedback, in the comments.

Sidepodcast TV and the 2008 Season (Part 2)

In part one we looked into the problems we faced when considering a second season of F1 video podcasting. In part two, we'll look into some of the things we're doing to stay fresh and up-to-date.

A Video Forum

On the same day that Renault released their R28 challenger in Paris, Sidepodcast was at the Broadcast Live and VideoForum in London. This forum is the traditional stomping ground for the great and the good of the British television industry... and Keith Chegwin (don't ask).

You might think we'd be a little out of place in such company, but the thing is, we don't do "video clips" and we have no interest in simply being a conduit for whatever video press release an F1 team decides to push out this week. We want to create brand new and original Formula 1 content, so although nothing we create goes anywhere near a television station, we're sort of making TV.

It turns out that our trip wasn't at all in vain, and the forum turned over a wealth of ideas that gave us a whole new viewpoint on the possibilities of video creativity. Aside from the millions of pounds worth of television equipment stacked high inside Earls Court 2, there were a whole bunch of fantastically invaluable seminars to sit in on. Also, Sequence Post Production were in attendance - F1 fans may recognise the name as the company behind Martin Brundle's brilliant F1 Insight series - and they were an amazingly helpful bunch of people.

Circuit Maps

So what did we learn and what are we doing?

First and foremost, we discovered onscreen graphic overlays, and that gave us a jumping off point. You may have noticed we are doing race preview videos again this year, and we're doing them because we think we've found a number of ways to differentiate. The structure of the show has clearly changed, based on all the constructive feedback we received, but for us the one thing that currently stands out are the live circuit overlays.

A subtle change from last year, I'm sure you'll agree and hardly a paradigm shift by anyone's standards... but they represent a lot. We've created them in their entirety and synced that little dot to the car on the track, and you'll only see them on Sidepodcast TV (at least for the moment). Plus, we can do more, much more.

One thing we've never been able to complain about in F1, is the information graphics FOM put on screen during a race. They are second to none, and they are our benchmark. We already have a few similar samples in development and we'll be adding them to future episodes as soon as we're able to.

The above really only scratches the surface of what's now possible, so this year we'll be adding more and more unique experiences that should ensure we don't repeat ourselves, we don't get boring and we're different from everybody else.

There's more to cover and we'll come back to this subject in future behind-the-scenes posts, but do let us know if you think we're on the right lines, the wrong lines or if you'd just rather we got on with it, stopped all this yapping and created some bloomin' video.