Modernising The Antique...

Now in its 37th series, the BBC Antiques Roadshow selected Vivid Broadcast as its OB Provider in a deal that saw the company take a 10,000-mile tour around Britain, meeting some new challenges along the way.

Little has changed of the Antiques Roadshow format, which first aired its pilot as a documentary in 1977. However, behind the scenes a subtle evolution is taking place. With unique locations and tight production schedules, a sleeker, more streamlined breed of facilities was called for.
Vivid Broadcast provides live coverage across light entertainment, sports and various large scale events. Most recently they have been working in music, from Glastonbury stages and the Radio 6 Festival to much smaller, more intimate set ups with artists such as Gary Barlow and Elton John for the Radio 2 In Concert series. Now the challenge was to adapt to a different format.
"When we were approached by the BBC, the specification for the OB was to include some of the shows being recorded using a flypack instead of a truck," says Stephen Montgomery, Project Engineer at Vivid.
"We took on board their reasons for this but also recognised that their requirements for the show would be fully utilising the OB truck set up with only just enough time for that with the tight rehearsal and shoot schedule for each location."
"The roadshow is always looking for ways of recording that offers our directors an approach that is both flexible and spontaneous," said Simon Shaw, Series Producer.
Stephen continues: "We devised a concept whereby the OB truck could do each show but the gallery of the truck, and everything the director needed, could be mirrored and remotely located away from the truck with a specially designed flight case in its own tent."
This was trialled on a few of the shows using For-A HVS Vision mixer and running ARCNET over to control the main frame remotely and is now adopted as the default setup. This gives all the flexibility and speed of rigging that is offered by the truck but allows the director to be closer to the action. Alongside this was the introduction of a producers trolley.
Using a mixture of fibre and copper cabling, the production can re-locate between setups as the production moves around the venue, whether that's stately home or castle. For previous series, the production generated an EDL file from the vision mixer cut to help with the edit but for this series Vivid took it a step further and implemented Softron's Multicam Logger and MovieRecorders.
"This system can generate a Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier project that already has vision mixer cuts on the timeline, all linked to the correct media for each camera. The system has a theoretical limit of 24 cameras which is plenty for the 4 or 5 needed for the average Antiques Roadshow. The BBC can walk away with all that they need for the show on a couple of G-Raid drives, leaving a backup set in the truck which is re-used once all footage is checked."
Stephen believes in Vivid's ability to constantly review their methodology which allows them to push their rigs much further.
"We don't consider our project implementation to be complete and are still looking for ways of improving the offering. The Antiques Road Show has the benefit of week on week tweaks, things like reducing the number of cores of fibre required for a trolley resulting in faster rig time, are all reaped."

The article is also available in BFV online.

(IT/JP)