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NEWSGATHERING TEAM FRONTLINE TV USES THE

DSR-DU1 HARD DISK RECORDER AS A SECURE BACK-

UP FOR SENSITIVE FOOTAGE

In February 1991 freelance camera operator Vaughan

Smith disguised himself as an army ofﬁcer and

inﬁltrated the ranks at the frontline of the Gulf war.

His ingenuity allowed him to ﬁlm the only unrestricted

footage of Desert Storm.

Much of this material on the ground war is still avail-

able through the ex-BBC cameraman's crewing

agency, Frontline TV, whose team of experienced

freelancers have covered events in Afghanistan,

Israel, Macedonia, Zimbabwe and Iraq. When BBC

Newsgathering approached Frontline recently to

shoot and make several copies of an important and

secret interview, Smith opted for the latest in hard

disk technology.

"All I was told was that a member of Al-Qaeda

wanted to speak to the press. Obviously in these

sorts of circumstances all sorts of people would try

and sabotage the interview or seize a copy to prevent

the footage from being broadcast", he reveals.

To ensure its chances of broadcast, three copies of

the 45-minute interview were made simultaneously

by attaching a DSR-DU1 hard disk recorder – sup-

plied by broadcast distributors Mitcorp – to Smith's

DVCAM camcorder. The DSR-DU1 works by docking

onto the rear of a camcorder by use of an optional

CA-DU1 camera adaptor and then connecting an

i-Link cable from the camcorder to the adaptor.

Camera output is then recorded to the hard drive of

the DSR-DU1 in parallel with the recording on the

camera's tape.

"Through the i-Link interface, the device can also

interface with a variety of hand-held cameras and

has the advantage of increasing recording time from

the 40 minutes of a standard cassette to three hours.

It's a cheap and portable method of making dupli-

cates in the ﬁeld – the only other way we would

have got multiple copies would have been through

daisy chaining other large recording decks together."

Frontline, whose clients include Channel 4, TV2

Danmark, TV2 Norway, RTE and ABC, also requires

duplicate copies of interviews and events when it is

working in association with more than one broad-

caster. According to Smith, who has been shot twice

during his career, there's another quite simple advan-

tage to making duplicates in this way. "Quite often

soldiers or the authorities will stop you at gunpoint

and try to take your tape off you, but they never both-

er with hard disk recorders because they're trained to

look for tape."

Smith also praises the DSR-DU1 for its useful

function as a back-up when shooting material from

dusty and sandy locations since it tends to be more

robust than tape.

Once the shoot is complete, with the right code the

device can be detached from the camcorder and

used for ﬁeld off-line logging of EDL creation. And

because it is a fraction of the size of other hard disk

recorders, freelance operators like Smith are able to

take it into the ﬁeld.

"For the freelance it is a versatile and useful bit of

equipment which is bridging the gap between tape

and the computer", Smith concludes.