The Producer Report: OB/Live events
no good if you are doing an OB at a venue that has for 3G as soon as it is available. The picture quality
copper installed,” he says. “If it only works with triax is excellent and tops anything that I have seen. So
then you have the opposite problem at a fibre installed they are the best you can get in terms of imagery.”
venue – you make a lot of work for yourself recabling With Sony introducing upgraded R versions of
the venue. It doesn’t matter how good a cameras is the 1500, 1550 and 3300 SuperMotion cameras,
in its own right, it needs to be flexible.” with improved CCD blocks and software
Flexibility has certainly been key to the success improvements, the plan is to continue to keep the
of the HDC-1500, the most widely used top-of- most established system cameras out in front.
the-range HD OB camera, which can be used with SIS LIVE engineering manager Adrian
both fibre and triax (using an HDTX-100 adapter), Kingston stresses that the Sony 1500s and 3300
and is now capable of 3G transmission. SuperMotion cameras still represent the high water
mark of HD OB acquisition and are heavily used
TOP END, TOP CHOICE at major OB events such as Wimbledon where 70
Arqiva’s Bowler can’t see anything shifting the cameras – including nine SuperMotions – were
dominance of the HDC-1500 as the HD system used this year: “That won’t change any time soon
camera of choice: “On the football we do for Sky unless a better camera emerges,” believes Kingston.
Sports, for example, we will always go for the most “At present there’s still something very reassuring
high-end cameras so we will be updating the 1500 about Sony kit in that it always seems to do what it
says it will and it tends to do it all the time.”
Although Kingston says that SIS LIVE reviews
its use of system cameras all the time, looking at
launches from Ikegami and Thomson, Sony
product still leads the field. “We prefer the
colourimetry and the quality of the general
picture,” he says.
VISION MIXERS
Shot entirely in HD for the first time this year,
Kingston and his 150-strong crew required more
EVS storage than ever at Wimbledon this year,
doubling their capacity from five to 10 300GB
models. Another first was the introduction of the
Sony MVS-8000 vision mixer, which took over
from the Thomson Grass Valley machine
previously used. For future tournaments SIS LIVE
is building a new full-length triple expanding OB
unit based around the Sony MVS-8000,
specifically designed for covering Wimbledon and
the Open Golf.
Vision engineer Arran Parkinson from OB
outfit Arena TV, which covers Sky’s boxing and
darts coverage, is another fan of the MVS vision
6\[VM[OLVMÄJL&
32 theproducer Autumn 2009
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