Natural Selection Tour Deploys Drone, Fully Wireless AV Infrastructure Live-stabilized racing drone shadows snowboarders sliding down insanely steep slopes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Thursday, February 3, 2022 - 11:17 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Think of it as Winter X Games 2.0-Plus, only faster. The Natural Selection Tour brings together top snowboarders from throughout the sport to compete across dynamic mountain venues as they vie for the title of world's best all-around snowboarder. The three-day streamed event has returned with three in the series for 2022: YETI Natural Selection at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (Jan. 24-30), Natural Selection at Baldface Lodge (Feb. 21-27), and Natural Selection in the Tordrillo Mountains (March 21-27).
What distinguishes this year's events is how wireless audio and video brought viewers right on top of athletes in venues most mountain goats would think twice about. The Jackson Hole Mountain Resort event, the first in the series, was a riot of freestyle moves, all closely caught with an intense assortment of wireless audio and video systems, including some kick-ass drone work, showing that racing drones aren't just for racing anymore.
Basically, in Jackson Hole, we were tasked to cover an untraditional live back-country snowboarding event, and the terrain was pretty wild, observes Chris Steblay, senior producer/creative director, Uncle Toad's Media Group (UTMG), the event producer. It required, he adds, a blend of broadcast know-how with a little bit of ski-junkie enthusiasm.
UTMG's crew created an ad hoc broadcast compound in a horse pasture, housing Dome Productions' Journey A and B units, a remote hosts set, and an administrative structure for judges and other principals. From there, the team set out to cover an estimated 15-plus acres of steep snow-covered slopes using an entirely wireless infrastructure assembled by RF Wireless Inc.
The only wired cameras we have would be our two host-set cameras, he says. Other than that, we're all several miles away from where the field of play is.
A Moment for Sports-Drone Technology According to Steblay, much of the production's vision came from UTMG's collaboration with Travis Rice. Ranked No. 13 on Snowboarder magazine's list of the 20 most influential snowboarders of the past 20 years and a founder of the Natural Selection tour, Rice is also widely credited as an advocate for the authentic experience of riding free on natural terrain - Natural Selection's raison d' tre - vs. the carefully groomed halfpipes and other now-conventional tropes of extreme winter sports.
The projects he does are light years ahead of what anyone else is doing in the sport, Steblay says. When he's doing a live broadcast, you have that benchmark that we're trying to hit. We know the level of quality that Travis Rice wants.
Achieving that meant going beyond the GoPro camera on a fish pole held by a snowboarder following an athlete downslope. It meant drones.
Liam Griffin, COO and co-founder of the Natural Selection Tour, approached Gabriel Kocher, aka Gab707, one of the world's leading drone-racing pilots, about adapting a racing drone to serve as a close-up follow-cam for the snowboarders on their runs. An intense collaboration of UTMG, Kocher, and camera partner GoPro - involving weeks of onsite R&D and testing in Jackson Hole - produced what Steblay describes as the first-ever live-stabilized racing drone.
This is literally the first racing drone ever built that had onboard stabilization, he explains. The biggest issue with being able to integrate a live drone [into sports production] is that all that footage you see on social media or used in movies [has gone] through a ton of postproduction image stabilization. They're running tons of software with it to stabilize that footage because, otherwise, you'd get seasick watching the raw footage. What Gab helped us do is [fabricate] a lightweight gimble onto the drone for the camera. That gave us a rock-steady, easy-to-watch, 1080p primary action camera off of a small, lightweight racing drone.
In addition, four EVS instant-replay servers - two 12-channel and two eight-channel XT3 units - were deployed, connecting wirelessly with two 3-phase Sony HDC-5500 4K cameras deployed in different positions on the mountain for replays in high-frame-rate mode for 60-fps super-slo-mo replays. Additional gear included five Sony HDC-2400 and three Panasonic PTZ cameras. GoPro Hero10 cameras were aboard the FPV drones.
Wireless wasn't the only concern during the shoot. Steblay reports that almost 6 ft. of snow fell just before and during the event, giving boarders some nice powder but collapsing a couple of operations tents and adding to the natural challenges of shooting in the Rocky Mountains in winter. The crew had to haul and emplace nearly two dozen wireless hubs along the snowboard routes using Sno-Cat vehicles - at night.
Our biggest challenges were how to keep our crew safe and get the job done, Steblay says. It's a big-budget project for our production company. We want to execute flawlessly, but we don't have a billion resources for redundancy. It's all about making sure that everything works the first time.
Athlete Audio Ben Boriss, VP, ops and production, RF Wireless, supervised deployment of 22 2-GHz microwave links for use by the modified LIVE FPV drone cams (including one LIVE Alta X heavy-payload drone to support a M VI Carbon camera), three handheld cams and a jib cam, the production's Motorola wireless comms system, and the Q5X PlayerMic bodypack transmitters with Sennheiser MKE-2 capsules worn on the snowboarders' parka collars.
We used multiple receive sites for the RF and multiple relay locations - a total of about 30 antenna
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
15/06/2026
Detach from Direct-Attached: How Remote Editing with EVO Keeps Creative Teams Mo...
14/06/2026
Library captures 1960s R&B/pop drum sound
Following on from their recent wave of plug-in effects, Iconic Instruments have just launched an all-new virtual d...
14/06/2026
HBO Comedy Rooster Shot with URSA Cine 17K 65
Brie Clayton June 14, 2026
0 Comments
Large format brings viewers intimately close to characters.
Black...
13/06/2026
Latest expansion pack includes 252 presets
Devious Machines have recently introduced another expansion for their powerful multi-effects plug-in, Infiltrator...
13/06/2026
Create custom DAW/plug-in controllers using prompts
MetaGrid have recently introduced an all-new AI Builder function to their touchscreen-based control surf...
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
YES Network and The Gotham Sports App will air seven Athletes Unlimited Softball...
12/06/2026
The United Football League will host its FAST Innovation Suite at the 2026 United Bowl presented by Credit One Bank on Saturday, June 13 at 3:00 p.m. ET at Audi...
12/06/2026
PTZOptics and LayerJot will present live demonstrations at InfoComm 2026 showing how natural-language AI prompting, robotic camera control, and on-device comput...
12/06/2026
MultiDyne Video and Fiber Optic Systems will exhibit at InfoComm 2026, featuring...
12/06/2026
Ateme has announced that Eurovision Services is using Ateme's software-based frame-rate conversion technology for international live event workflows. The de...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin and Simplestream have announced a partnership with Xperi to simplify the launch of OTT streaming services on TiVo OS smart TVs and devices. The collabo...
12/06/2026
Net Insight has announced that a multinational technology company is deploying a...
12/06/2026
MLB Players Inc., the business arm of the MLB Players Association, has announced a partnership with Athletes First to develop and sell brand partnerships across...
12/06/2026
Guntermann and Drunck (G&D) and VuWall have announced the CommandKeyboard-Advanc...
12/06/2026
Comcast Smart Solutions announces a new smart technology deployment with Major L...
12/06/2026
Elevation Worship completed the initial leg of its Elevation Nights 2026 tour ...
12/06/2026
AJA Video Systems has announced KONA IP25 support for Colorfront Transkoder and ...
12/06/2026
Audinate Group Limited (ASX: AD8) will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth C7321, Ce...
12/06/2026
Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould has announced the appointment of Scott Adametz as Chief Technology Officer. The Pac-12 describes the hire as the first CTO appo...
12/06/2026
Grass Valley has announced AMPP Edge Live, a production system combining Grass Valley hardware, NVIDIA Blackwell GPU acceleration, and AMPP OS in a single platf...
12/06/2026
At one time a trailblazer with the launch of the Longhorn Network, the Universit...
12/06/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent rating news and is derived from press rel...
12/06/2026
Chyron has announced PAINT 10.4, an update to its illustrated replay and sports ...
12/06/2026
SVP, Production, Mark Gross: With the new schedule, with not having every Sunday night, it has given us an opportunity to take a step back and reimagine what o...
12/06/2026
For Televisa Technical Engineering Manager Roberto N nez Ibarra and the small team of 12 technicians and two production personnel at the IBC things are already ...
12/06/2026
Simple Steps to Better Acoustics - Taming The Small Room
Most of us mix in spare rooms and small spaces, where the acoustics fight us at every turn. At Gear...
12/06/2026
Latest addition expands vintage-inspired effects palette
Meris' Ottobit pedal range draws its inspiration from vintage gaming consoles, and the latest a...
12/06/2026
Soundbox-based chamber strings series expanded
Sonora Cinematic have just announced the launch of the second instalment in their Soundbox-based chamber stri...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
AJA Announces KONA IP25 Integration with Colorfront Software
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Collaboration enables uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 I/O ...
12/06/2026
URSA Cine 12K LF Used to Create Visuals for STUTS' K-Arena Concert
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Organic visuals projected on a giant scre...
12/06/2026
MTI FILM Acquires Mango New Edit, Expanding its Global Post-Production Services ...
12/06/2026
AI Point Tracking Speeds Up Complex VFX Tracks in Mocha Pro
Jessie Electa Petrov June 12, 2026
0 Comments
The 2026.5 release adds automatic point trac...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin, a provider of video streaming solutions, has partnered with Simplestream, a provider of OTT and broadcast solutions, and technology provider Xperi, to...
12/06/2026
Leostream Corporation, creator of the world-leading Leostream Remote Desktop Access Platform, today announced Jigsaw24, a leading B2B IT solutions provider wit...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
How Aussie indie games and screen are levelling up with IP 11 June 2026
Ari Harrison, Pro Jank Footy
Head of Games Joey Egger and Ari Harrison of Umbrella sha...
12/06/2026
AgentPerf from Artificial Analysis, the industry's first agentic AI benchmark, gives developers, enterprises and infrastructure providers a clear way to com...
Natural Selection Tour Deploys Drone, Fully Wireless AV Infrastructure Live-stabilized racing drone shadows snowboarders sliding down insanely steep slopes By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
