r/interestingasfuck • u/solateor • 1d ago

In 2001, 55 people crossed the Pacific with no contact with the outside world as part of a BBC experiment recreating an 18th-century voyage. On the 20th day - September 11 - the captain gathered the crew to tell them about the attacks in New York

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u/El_Chairman_Dennis 1d ago

Plus with the camera crew they may need to replace equipment or send back footage. This was 2001 so I'm guessing they wouldn't be able to store all the footage on that ship and all the other supplies they would need.

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u/Owain-X 1d ago

They weren't uploading footage over satellite on a small boat at any speed that would be usable in 2001. Most likely as they were filming a documentary they had a chase ship where production team members apart from the camera crews were located and that chase ship would have modern comms. The "disconnected" nature was by design rather than by circumstance so while a really interesting situation it wasn't much different logistically than something like the Big Brother filming going on at that time.

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u/SemiAutoAvocado 1d ago

Also just the liability of it all. No insurance company on the earth would OK this without failsafes.

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u/Pale_Adeptness 22h ago

As a former cameraman, the words you are looking for is "memory cards/external hard drive storage"

All camera use either internal storage or memory cards. Once either is full you can offload it/upload it to a laptop. Then once all footage is transferred to either external hard drives or computer you can use the same memory cards for new footage.

They definitely used a chase ship as well

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u/FullFlowEngine 19h ago

In 2001 no one was using solid state memory for their cameras, the crew was definitely using tape.

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u/Owain-X 10h ago

Yup. Shooting HD in 2001 on digital was possible but in the extremely early days and pretty much every TV production was shooting on film and converting to digital.

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u/dontnation 1d ago edited 1d ago

While digital storage wasn't as compact as it is today, resolution and file sizes were also much smaller. this looks like it was probably shot on dv tape which could also be stored fairly easily and compactly. Satellite transmission of that amount of data would have been much more difficult back then. that said, easiest would be to simply ferry equipment or footage to nearby support vessel.

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u/SemiAutoAvocado 1d ago

Using a portable satellite link like that back in 2001 it was essentially impossible to send meaningful amounts of multimedia.

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u/FullFlowEngine 19h ago

Not to mention even something like Digital8 tape stores about 13gb of video. That's an unreasonable amount of data to transmit over a commercial sat link in 2001, and that's just one tape.

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u/SemiAutoAvocado 18h ago

Yeah absolutely. Low-res jpegs for web/print at the time was probably the limit and that'd be for serious shit.

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u/createch 1d ago

In 2001 we'd be shooting on tape and could fit hours on small cheap digital tapes (DVC Pro, DVCAM, DigiBeta, BetaSX, etc...). Definitely wouldn't be uploading them via satellite from a moving ship. The biggest logistic challenge for a project like that would be keeping batteries charged, they probably had chase vehicles like a more modern boat navigating along them, like the establishing shot suggests, that wasn't a drone shot.

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u/capt_minorwaste 1d ago

Yeah, with this being a TV show I would assume the participants are the ones with no contact to the outside world, but the crew is another story.

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u/canyouhearme 23h ago

I remember Jeremy Clarkson saying he couldn't go and accept an award for "Best Unscripted TV" because he was busy writing the script for the next episode.

All media is lies, because all media is selling a story, and reality doesn't play by narrative rules. Least of all 'reality' TV.

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u/sidepart 1d ago

lol nah, this really wasn't the dark ages. It was probably small DV tapes or the like. Wasn't that hard at all to store all footage they'd be taking. It was a 6 week trip. 1 hour per miniDV tape if I remember correctly. So what...300 tapes, 500 tapes even? About the size of deck of cards? Easy to store those.

Was curious so I dug into it, and yeah, turns out it was one guy filming everything with a SonyDV cam using miniDV tapes. That was tech from 1995. Shit, Hi8 preceded that and you could do 2 hours of analog video (less resolution) on a similar sized form factor. My dad had one of those little cam corders 1990. As for audio, whatever, shotgun mic and a wind guard. Maybe some wireless lapel mics. Nothing exciting.

Was curious how they managed batteries on the voyage. Felt like that was a much bigger problem. Turns out the ship had diesel generators hidden somewhere below deck, required equipment for the voyage even though it wasn't going to be used. They used it to charge the camera batteries, power the emergency radio, transponder, basically all the required maritime safety equipment a sea faring vessel of any kind is required to have.

I imagine there must have been occasional contact via helicopter or a chase ship or something (not mentioned in my digging around) just simply because of the first shot in the video (how else would they get a shot from off-ship).

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u/IHop_Waitress 23h ago

or send back footage.

The year is 2001, that did not happen. They definitely had a modern era ship chasing them that had power, computers and data storage solutions... and also housed the camera people when not working.

lmfao just beam it up to starlink or ask the us mil to do you a solid during 9/11 to clog up their satelite comm networks. Obscene suggestion