IBC delegates applauded the world premiere of footage from James Cameron’s 3D Deepsea Challenge, made for National Geographic, including shots of touching down 11,000 metres below the sea surface in the Mariana Trench. The footage was stunning, especially because in his introduction the Hollywood director and explorer held up the ‘nano camera’ which is about the size of ‘a couple of quarters stacked together’ and is a 1080p/1920/24fps HD high resolution camera able to withstand pressure at 36,000 feet (almost seven miles) underwater. In total the Deep Sea Challenger vehicle carried four exterior HD cameras, one interior 4K camera and two HD feeds inside the submersible itself. Cameron Pace Group designed the cameras. “It’s the kind of technology challenge that Vince (Pace) and I like,” he said. “We have an appetite for innovation that distinguishes us.” Cameron is a vocal advocate of 3D and he told The IBC Daily he is concerned that 3D is jockeying for position with 4K to the detriment of the former. “We have a bandwidth bottleneck and if we start going to higher spatial resolution it will be at the sacrifice of 3D rollout. So I see it as a little bit of an arms race right now.” Cameron foresees that “shadow technology” definitely has its place, but he believes that as broadcasters like ESPN build confidence, “they quickly evolve for cost reasons to a pure 3D model as the primary cameras and extract the 2D feed from that.” – Kate Bulkley
