Katrina Through the HD Lens

As Hurricane Rita bore down on Texas recently, J.T. Alpaugh was one of the few people heading into the state, rather than out. At press time, Alpaugh, CTO of Helinet Aviation Services of Van Nuys, Calif., and his partner, Alan Purwin, founder of Helinet and a longtime Hollywood stunt pilot, were enroute to the hurricane''s target area. They were to hook up with a waiting American Eurocopter AStar 350B2 helicopter and outfit it with their portable and proprietary Cineflex HD-V14 aerial camera system to provide the world some of the first, highest-resolution images of the devastation wreaked by that killer storm.

Alpaugh and Purwin were going to cover Rita immediately on the heels of providing historic aerial coverage of the incredible devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi caused by Hurricane Katrina. Their HD aerial system ended up providing pool coverage of the affected region during the month immediately after Katrina struck—footage seen across the globe on various networks. Usually, that footage was downconverted and viewed in standard def by most viewers, except on Mark Cuban''s HDNet and a handful of other network HD channels.

Alpaugh was the reporter whose voice was heard describing the devastation on those reports. After Helinet''s helicopter reached the affected areas, all major networks agreed to let the company supply pool footage when it quickly became clear that, due to emergency conditions, the number of news helicopters allowed in the area would be limited due to logistical impediments.

In the last year, Helinet outfitted and supplied the nation''s first true HD newscopters with full HD downlink capabilities for TV stations KABC in Los Angeles and KUSA in Denver. These projects were completed in addition to the company's regular service of supplying HD aerial coverage for television and motion picture production. In recent years, Helinet has supplied news coverage to HDNet and many local news stations, but Hurricane Katrina represented the first time its footage--or anyone''s HD-acquired footage--became the primary source of realtime visuals on a major breaking news story for literally the entire world.

“We arrived about two hours after Katrina left the area, and we began documenting what we saw, offering the footage to anyone who wanted it without affiliating ourselves with a single network,” Alpaugh explains. “We started feeding images to the networks in HD, and they quickly got together and asked our ship to be the pool helicopter. We used the project ship that we usually demo our technology in and use for live sports and news applications, and which we showed at NAB.

“Katrina was, of course, an amazing challenge and a learning experience for us. We had our own satellite uplink truck ready to go, but for the first couple of days getting it into New Orleans was a challenge, since the roads were so littered with downed trees. So for those first couple of days, we would fly a tape to our truck, and they would uplink to the networks. But after a couple days, we got another satellite truck into the area, and from that point on we were able to send out live pictures to the networks. (At press time), now that we are heading to cover Rita, we''ll be able to put some of those lessons to work about how to position and pre-plan resources on the ground, and also, about things like having good food and water in place, and so forth.”

Helinet regularly supplies HD aerial coverage for television and motion picture production. The company uses an American Eurocopter AStar 350B2 helicopter outfitted with its portable and proprietary Cineflex HD-V14 camera system. (Photo by Mark Forman Productions Corp.)

The Helinet Cineflex HD system consists of a Sony HDW-F950 camera used in combination with a sophisticated, proprietary gimbel system. The gimbel contains lenses (Helinet can configure it with a variety of lenses from all major manufacturers, but for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the company primarily used 1140mm 84x Fujinon zooms) and the optical block of the camera system itself. The whole thing is then controlled from inside the helicopter by laptop. The helicopter also features a sophisticated microwave transmitter and high-gain directional pod, permitting live transmission of an HD and/or SD signal live from the helicopter as the images are acquired. Alpaugh says Helinet uses a proprietary codec to compress the HD signal for transmission to uplink facilities as far as 100 miles away.

“The gimbel is the big thing because it can rotate 360 degrees, and has a slip ring to let the camera turn around without any loss of quality of the HD signal,” he says. “That signal travels through the cable system to an auxiliary box where the camera body is imbedded, and from there, on to the microwave components and our on-board HD monitors.”

Alpaugh adds that the basic Cineflex system—the camera, auxiliary box, gimbel, lenses, and associated gear—weighs around 100lbs., allowing Helinet representatives to travel with the system on commercial airliners to locations where important news developments are unfolding. There, they meet up with their own helicopters, or those provided locally, and install the system with a variety of different mounts, depending on the helicopter and application, to get up and running in just a few hours.

Alpaugh says that although only a small percentage of those watching Katrina and Rita news coverage saw the pristine HD images, since most were watching SD broadcasts, the technology''s usefulness in such situations is just beginning to be realized. He points out that even SD viewers received a signal with more detailed information than they would if his system were using standard ENG cameras, and all this historic footage can now be archived for posterity at extremely high resolution.

But far more important, Alpaugh says, is the notion that HD acquisition technology itself can eventually become a fundamental tool to aid law enforcement and rescue operations. In fact, he says, the Helinet system helped rescuers in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.

“You need a specialized gimbal to keep the camera still and stabilize the HD lens while zooming from a long way away,” Alpaugh says. “And as we quickly found out, during Katrina, we were not just documenting what happened. We were using our camera system to zoom in very close, finding people hanging out of houses and windows, or in small spaces between houses. We zoomed into places that were hard for rescue copters to find, and several times we called in GPS coordinates to rescuers when we saw some of those people. The technology proved extremely valuable in those rescue operations, and I think there are lots more applications like that.

“Plus, you can''t ignore how important it is to see these images in full HD. If standard-def speaks 1,000 words, HD screams a million words, or in this case, a billion words. We were able to help tell a story of utter disaster everywhere, and we''re proud we had a system capable of doing that—to be one of the first to show the world what was really going on.”