The challenge of producing TV on a solar powered boat.

Producing reality television usually requires a large crew and significant facility support. We have none on the Solar Odyssey Challenge.

First problem is that production equipment runs on 110v AC and the boat is equipped with 24v DC. Fortunately  the input voltage for Apple MacBook Pros (out of the AC adapter) is 12 v, and 12 v  DC is easy to derive from 24v DC. That would be really easy as Apple make an Airline adapter that accepts 12 v DC with the Magsafe adapter. Sadly, that will not charge the laptops, just power them, so we’re stuck with making a custom solution that will involve cutting cables and adding our own connectors.

The same problem exists with storage. As we cannot afford space for any server other than a Mac Mini, our storage has to be Thunderbolt, which means working with our friends at Stardom Storage to custom prepare a 12v version – again fortunately hard drives themselves run on 12v and 5v, which we can work with.

Our equipment setup is likely to be:

• Three 17″ MacBook Pros, preferably with SSD storage for the lower power consumption
• Mac Mini server acting as WiFi base station, connecting primary storage and sharing it.
• Duplicate Thunderbolt RAID 5 mini towers with at least 12 TB net storage space each.
• iPads for everything else: navigation, camera monitoring (via Teradeck Cubes?), email, web browsing (because it takes less power to do that on an iPad), releases and clearances (because there’s no room for paper!), etc

Combined that’s a significant power draw at 12 v DC. If all gear is running we could be drawing 25 amps at 12 V, or around 300 W of concurrent draw. Over a 12 hour day that adds another 3.6KW/hour to our need to generate each and every day. (Although fortunately we will be charging and drawing down batteries that carry at least two day’s power storage, but a couple of dull gray days and we could be shutting down production until a sunny day.)

Off boat backup is still going to be required.  Having seen a RAID 5 simply self immolate – even though there was no dive failure in this instance – the plan is to work with one primary RAID and then do a sync to the second RAID once or twice a day, leaving the second RAID off at other times to conserve energy.  But that is not really safe enough: should we lose the boat we would lose all the source footage, so some sort of off-boat backup is required.  Waiting to fill hard drives would leave us with days of vulnerability at any moment, and the cost of drives and shipping duplicates is going to add up. The plan is to use USB memory sticks, or SD cards for almost daily backup and post off duplicate copies to two different addresses, whenever we are in port near a mailbox.

Audio is another problem. With a mixture of presenter pieces (with B-roll); interviews, crew confessionals and always on cameras, audio is a challenge.  There’s no crew or room for a dedicated audio person with traditional boom. And frankly we really (other than interviews and to-camera presenter pieces) what audio we’ll need.  My current thinking is to radio mic every crew member or guest and record all in parallel to the Mac Mini server. Then when the dailies are trimmed run some (yet to be developed*) custom software that pulls out all mics for the timespan of the dailies.

These are but a few of thousands of challenges and there will be more along the way. We won’t have space for a comprehensive grip kit, so have to rely on larger sensor cameras, minimal LED (Litepanels) lighting, and (perhaps) Joby Gorillapods to “hang” or mount them. (Yes, they have models strong enough for even a Litepanel 1×1, likely to be our primary location/interview light.