Giro d'Italia 2011, an all-RAI tv “product”

Conversation with Auro Bulbarelli, Vice Director of Raisport and Team Leader of “Giro d'Italia”
Over 200 hours of live broadcasts for the 94th edition of “Giro d'Italia”, through the experience of sports editorial office of Raisport. From May 7th to 29th, tens of professionals every moment of the “Corsa” was followed live. The several tv programmes aired were “Si Gira”, “Aspettando il Giro”, the live event, the “Processo alla tappa”, “TGiro” and “Giro Notte”. Rai3, Raisport 1 and Raisport 2 were the channels thoroughly devoted to follow the event in every detail to anticipate and amplified the information and curiosity on the event organized by Italian newspaper “Gazzetta dello Sport”.
Since 2009 Auro Bulbarelli is Vice Director at Raisport delegated to “cycling” and after ten years of first line as a tv commentator, together with Director Eugenio DePaoli, he had to chose the team destined to follow every cycling race that RAI had acquired and diverted on the two sports channels available, Raisport 1 and Raisport 2.
Both are devoted to sports, received on the whole Italian country via terrestrial digital transmitters and on the rest of the footprint of Hot Bird satellites, dedicating several of the available playlist hours right to cycling races.
Bulbarelli on such matters declares: “Both for passion and profession, but never in the past we reached so many hours of cycling on RAI. Actually the two main Italian historical tv broadcasts are the “Festival di Sanremo” and “Giro d'Italia”.
This year the “Giro” edition was completely realized with internal forces, within RAI, but the hire of the helicopters used for all broadcasts to the control rooms.
The main challenge was for us the switch from analogue tv production to digital, along with new tv cameras, and we made a lot of efforts. But the next leap is towards high definition transmissions, probably within next year. But to be honest the real issue of the shooting and tv techniques in general for the Giro d'Italia -if compared to the “Tour de France”- is the orographic feature of the landscape.
Actually Italy is a very difficult landscape to be followed along the race and all its many segments, since the tv tech crews are constantly faced -and in the same day and the same lap- by difficulties in handling segments on the hills, then on the mountains, and again at the seaside, often with fog, bad weather, or under a torrid sun.
The period in which this famous race, the “Giro”, is held is May and not July, so meteorological conditions are crucial for the results and final images quality.”
In the last two or three years the big leap forward has been in the conversion of radio broadcast signals of the cameras which are now completely digitized both in the uplink and in downlink, from the studio to the helicopters and viceversa; all this was a real challenge which lead RAI to heavy investments.
And to report every leap, a giant but modular organization was setup to follow everything, from the daily live event to the daily reports, a tech structure headed by project leader Enrico Motta, and by Production responsible Riccardo Managlia. This machine had to be created to reply several complex needs involving a total of 20 tv cameras, slow motion, motor cycles shooting, helicopter images, digital radio links, moving control rooms to be assembled and disassembled as required at the arrival, amidst city roads and squares and crowds at every leap ...
More technical details to come.