Hi Def Studio For Irish Film School - Part 2

Continued from Part 1...

The Smallest Number Of Vendors
Kevin Fitzgerald had already sold a number of systems to the film school when based in Dublin.
"The actual studio project has been running for about six years. The building was contracted back three or four years ago, but the Irish economy dived and the builder went into receivership leaving a big hole in the ground," he said. "It came back on track and was completed in July. We went on site at the end of August.
"This was a full green field build - a full 1080p HD proposal, and HD fibre system from the off. The criteria was set very high as the school wanted a system that was de facto in usage terms in the industry, and one of the goals was to rent it out in down time," he added.
"It is very important from the service system design and integration design viewpoints to keep the number of diverse vendors to the smallest number as is absolutely possible. To that effect we decided to commission the glue, and routing, and the multi-screen displays all through one vendor."
That was Harris Broadcast. Gearhouse supplied the Arri Alexa, and all the studio cameras, which are from Hitachi. Fujinon lenses front all of these. The other big items include a Sony 520 2-ME vision mixer and a Grass Valley K2 Dyno replay system.

The multi viewers are displayed on 42-inch Sony screens. How are the studio cameras set up?

"The facility splits into two studios. The smaller one, which is used for green screen work, has one Hitachi camera mounted on a Vinten virtual reality head, which allows complete control from the gallery."
"The main studio has four cameras, three on pedestals and one on a Jimmy Jib. The flexibility of the system allows them to wheel in the fifth camera for full multi-camera shoots. One of the real benefits when installing the virtual head is that it is very easy to send both data and power down the fibre channel. We were able to take a 240 Volt tap straight out of the camera head, and minimise any additional cabling," he added.
The result is a single fibre cable from the small studio to what is a pleasingly large gallery with space for 12 people around three desks.
"With the dynamic drive pool and the K2 Dyno we are recording that live media onto disc drives and then sharing that out to an Avid Nitris," said Fitzgerald. "There is also an integration into Pro Tools."
Gearhouse was not claiming to have re-invented the wheel. "We were not putting anything in that is not an industry standard process," said Fitzgerald.
"But one of the benefits of minimising the number of vendors and following a high level specification is that the film school is training people to take jobs in the real world. That is only the second full HD facility in Ireland. Even the national broadcaster RTE doesn't have a full HD facility.
"We have a long time to go before this type of college finds itself outdated. We in the SI business have got a lot of people to update from SD, and the jump to 4K is a very open one," he said. "The market is developing towards the movement of audio and video over IP, and the bandwidth is becoming available.
"At this moment in time a lot of systems integration is not fully cost-effective but the standards for IP and AVB still have not been agreed in the marketplace," he added. "Having a system that is fully integrated with one piece of software talking to another software is being driven forward by a number of companies, but there are still communication and standards issues across different vendors, even with specific standards like JPEG 2000."
Fitzgerald highlight the fact that looking at defined standards differently will also keep IP a little way off. "It is going to save a huge amount of time and costs, because we are going to be able to run a lot less cable throughout any system," he said.
Taking a last look at the film school he added: "All of the courses right down to costume design are in a position to feed into the new studio environment. There is social media integration."
Read the article in the online edition of RFV here.
(IT/JP)