The Olympic DiveCam

As you watch Olympic diving, you may have wondered how the camera follows the divers every inch of the way from the platform to underwater. The answer is extremely old-fashioned: they drop the camera!

“Ideally,” Rob Brear said the other day, “the diver and the camera drop at the same time.” Mr. Brear, who is the DiveCam’s chief dropper, was in Beijing’s colossal “Water Cube,” the National Aquatic Center, standing behind a plastic screen on a ledge built just below the diving tower’s 10-meter platform. Between him and the platform, the DiveCam’s pipe hung suspended by a chain from the roof.

Mr. Brear, a 54-year-old Australian, was warming up — with the divers — for the first platform events of the Games on Monday and Tuesday. “After the camera drops,” he went on, “what you do is you pull it up again.” Ken East, another Australian and Mr. Brear’s teammate, sat behind him on a stool with his hand on the pulley’s brake. “It’s called gravity,” he said.

There are some other factors. The camera operator has to drop it at the right time, and a bungee cord is used to keep the camera from smashing against the bottom of the pool. The Wall Street Journal has an interactive graphic that shows how the tracking works. Link -via Geek Like Me