Courtside to cloud.

When you’re trying to match the pace of players like Stephen Curry while meeting the expectations of Golden State Warriors fans around the world, you and your team need to be at peak fitness, both on and off the court.

For Tom Frenette, Lead Videographer for the Warriors, this means equipping his crew with the right tools for the job, so that they can focus on getting that record-busting three-pointer from the arena to the fans faster than you’d think possible.

Courtside camera to cloud workflow

On-court, Frenette and his team capture the action with RED DSMC2 Gemini 5K S35 sensor bodies paired with DSMC2 Production Modules. These are fit with the Canon CINE-SERVO 25-250 mm T2.95 lens, which is fast and long enough to capture the action just about anywhere on the court and matches the Gemini’s S35 sensor perfectly.

The cameras are also fit with the Teradek CUBE 655, which is paired to a Camera to Cloud (C2C) Frame.io project for the game. Original camera files are recorded in-camera at 4K in 120fps so that no motion is missed, while the Teradek pushes 1080 p 23.98fps 10Mbps h.264 files across Wi-Fi to C2C where the editors — who might be upstairs in the arena or off-site — can pick them up and start work.

The edit team works natively with Adobe Premiere Pro, so the C2C files flow straight into the software, allowing titles and clip assemblies to be made as quickly as possible. Frame.io presentation links are available to project stakeholders for feedback and sign-off.

Frenette has also come up with an innovative workflow that allows him to send his 120fps footage via C2C so that his editors aren’t kept waiting for those dramatic slow motion shots. He simply switches the camera to playback mode and plays the clips back at 23.98 while streaming through the Teradek CUBE.

All of this creates a simple, highly effective courtside-to-cloud workflow that lets them get their branded, edited clips to Twitter in three minutes flat. In doing so, they remove almost all of the time constraints of legacy workflows and can post high-octane moments from the game within minutes of them taking place.

So, if you’re looking for the fastest member of the Golden State Warriors team, Stephen Curry is facing some stiff competition. And if you’re thinking that you can’t have both fast and effective work, check out the Instagram, Twitter and YouTube stats on the video. That’s over three million views across social for a single piece of content.

According to Frenette, the process is nearly flawless. The only catch is that some arenas have Wi-Fi that’s not quite as robust as the Chase Centre’s, so his solution is to add more 5G hotspots to the video crew’s court-side equipment list.

In the meantime, the original camera files are still available and added to the Frame.io project later. These files can then be used for long-form projects, highlight videos and sponsorship work. The editors can start work on the proxy files and relink them to the originals if there’s a rush on. Because Frenette’s team uses a logical date plus opponent project structure, they can quickly pull content from any game stored on their account. They can also use the commenting and search functions in Frame.io to tag in-game moments for easy recovery later.

“To cross-reference something else later down the line or go to an old clip that we’ve tagged or labelled, we can pull that up from a game. If we have a remote editor working from an airport or even from the plane, we could pull up a proxy file and download it for a quick-turn edit,” says Frenette.

So there’s no secret to it. When you have the best players in the game, give them the best tools for the job and watch them fly.