Here at Inertia Unlimited, we design and develop specialty cameras, primarily for broadcast sporting events, TV commercials, industrial applications, and scientific research. If you are looking for POV camera that can zoom in on the stretching muscles of a pitcher as the first pitch is thrown in a baseball game or isolated human cells under a laboratory microscope, we’re your company.

This year, we were contracted by NBC to record some of the alpine events at the Torino Olympics: snowmobile-racing, snowboarding, and freestyle and traditional skiing. In order to give the viewers a glimpse into what the athlete experiences racing down a hill or making a jump, we decided to place tiny cameras as well as DVRs on the athletes themselves.

The story of our relationship with the Olympics starts back in Salt Lake City, where we were contracted by NBC to provide POV cameras at a number of the alpine events. These cameras were set up to record on to tape, just as we had been doing in other installations for years.

When Torino rolled around, we decided that some of the things we had done in Salt Lake could be improved. We already had the Sony XC-555 cameras, but what we needed was a miniature recording device that would be immune to the G-force and vibration issues inherent to alpine events. For this, we turned to Fast Forward Video’s Mini DVR Pro, an ultra-compact DVR that provides broadcast-quality video and audio for rugged and portable applications. Its sturdy design and ultra-compact size make it ideal for attaching to an athlete’s body without slowing him down. It also features scalable Motion-JPEG compression and a pixel image resolution of 720 x 486 and can record over an hour with readily available compact Flash cards. It also comes with an on-board USB 2.0 port for downloadable files, as well as video capture and playback at 60 fields per second, resolution greater than 550 lines at 4:1 compression, user-selectable compression ratios ranging from 4:1 to 20:1, and recording times averaging between four to 20 minutes per GB.

As mentioned earlier, at Torino, we attached POV cameras and the FFV Mini DVR Pro to the athletes. The Mini DVR Pro recorded flawlessly, as expected. Because the Mini DVR Pro is non-taped based, there were no glitches or discontinuities in the recording, and it was able to handle the high G-force load and vibration of fast skiing and snowboarding, as well as the heavy landings after an aerial jump. So when a snowboarder or freestyle skier did three flips in the air and then landed, there was absolutely no discontinuity in the video. The incredible output we received made the experience for the viewers that much more thrilling.