“Let’s step up ‘Long Haul’s’ production value,” Sea-Doo’s Tim McKercher teased the night before. To this point, our arsenal of video equipment was a pair of GoPro Sessions (y’know, the little cheapo versions of the indestructible GoPro camera) and a DLSR Canon 70D. We knew we needed to spring the cash for a good microphone, but those ain’t cheap either. So until now, our style of filming was more “art house/guerrilla” style than “full fledged production company” if you catch our drift. So when Sea-Doo offered a camera crew with high range microphones and the use of a $100,000 high-resolution digital RED camera, it was hard to say no.
And why not? We were halfway into a four-day introduction and test session with Sea-Doo’s coup d’etat, the ST³ platform-based 2018 RXT-X 300. While we preferred the rich metallic silver Ice Metal-and-Lava Red livery, the melt-your-retinas-Neon Yellow definitely popped off the screen. Plus, we were also filming the equally-gorgeous Liquid Grey Metallic-and-Equestrian Brown GTX Limited 230 and 300s, so we had enough silver to go around. Sea-Doo’s film crew-for-hire were great, but lugging a $100K digital camera around (especially near water) made the cameraman more than just a little skittish. Some of those upclose shots? Yeah, he’s using my camera.
Then there was the problem of actually trying to download the files themselves. When using a camera that George Lucas used to film the “Star Wars” prequels, things tend to get a little sluggish when you don’t have a few extra terabytes of storage. That, more than anything, held up the release of this latest episode of “Long Haul” – so for that we apologize. Stepping up our game required a lot more work (and equipment) than expected. Yet, you can’t argue with the results. We’re incredibly proud of how this episode turned out and we hope you like it as much as we do. Of course, we touch on a lot of stuff both covered in our full-length feature story as well as a couple of things we left out, so there’s a lot to digest.
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“So when Sea-Doo offered a camera crew with high range microphones and the use of a $100,000 high-resolution digital RED camera, it was hard not to say no.”
Are you sure you didn’t mean “it was hard to say no?”