The second season of the series “Ice Road Truckers,” currently airing on History, once again has Sony’s XDCAM HD system taking on extreme cold, this time in the Arctic Circle.
In season two, the show heads to the town of Inuvik, more than 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, where the challenge is getting equipment and supplies to natural gas exploration sites and remote villages in and around the area. In season one, the show documented two months in the lives of truckers hauling supplies over frozen lakes in the Northwest Territories.
“Tape-based systems would not be practical for us at all,” Gavin Brennan, the series’ director of photography said. “Tape can get too brittle in the extreme cold and clog up the heads. The more moving parts you have, the more problems you can run into. The XDCAM system gives us no problems related to the weather or the conditions.”
During the production, the XDCAM HD camcorders are encased in protective rubberized tape and still continue to perform flawlessly, shot to shot, he said.
Brennan said he is also impressed with the ability to review footage on-the-fly as thumbnails on the camcorder’s LCD screen, enabling the crew to make decisions about the footage immediately without having to carry around a separate playback monitor.
