The 44th World Table Tennis Championships Through The Eye Of The Video Camera

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The 44th World Championships Through The Eye Of The Video Camera

BY GARY RUDERMAN, Owner-Producer, Reflex Sports

PART 1 of 4

With memories of the exciting Atlanta Olympic competition behind us, we prepared to videotape the 44th World Championships in Manchester. This competition would answer a number of questions important to the table tennis world. Would the Chinese continue to dominate the game as they did in Atlanta and Tianjin? Was Waldner finished as a serious contender? Was Samsonov ready to fulfill our prediction that he was a future World Champion? These questions would be answered in dramatic style in Manchester.

In an effort to accommodate our customers who have been asking for more complete games than we can fit into our usual six-hour coverage of World Championships, we decided to produce and sell eight hours for the same price as our previous six hours! We also purchased two state-of-the-art digital pro video cameras and editing decks. These decisions will make our videos affordable to more customers and will allow them to view more complete matches with significantly better quality footage.

Our production team arrived in Manchester on a cloudy day (that would turn out to be about the only dry weather we would face there) and hurried to the arena to check out the facilities. The G-Mex Center, is, like the table tennis facilities in Barcelona for the 1992 Olympics, a train station make-over. The traditional character, high ceilings and intimate flag-festooned 5,000 seat arena made for an interesting venue for this important event. Original tournament plans called for the use of a second and larger arena for the major matches, but the organizers feared that the market would not support the larger arena and opted for just one.

Getting set up to shoot the events was more of a problem than we have ever experienced in our twelve years of videotaping international competition. Because of the tight quarters, courtside space for cameras was at a premium, but we finally established camera positions that would provide the angles our viewers have come to expect. The even better news came from the scheduling committee who informed us that from the round of 16 on only two matches would be played at a time, so we would be able to videotape any matches we needed. On that positive note we were now ready to let the games begin!

Let the games begin

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