The Producer Report: Multi-camera
with an Interplay media management system. The media management is very precise, with
the four feeds that come from the cameras and the mix feed all being assigned an individual ident, while all the content is automatically collected into nested folders depending on scene, episode, day and week. The life cycle of Coronation Street from shoot through to transmission can be from seven to nine weeks, after which it’s output to Sony HDCAM SR tape and sent out for transmission. So at some point the media has to be deleted from the post production and backup servers. “If you don’t know where the media is, you can’t delete it and if you can’t delete it you run out of storage – especially on HD,” says O’Shaughnessy.
MANAGING ALL THE CONTENT Storage for content is a hugely important factor in multi-camera productions, but it differs by genre. “With a light entertainment show, there may be more cameras on set – maybe up to 10 cameras – so there will be an awful lot of content coming in at the same time for a two or three hour show,” says O’Shaughnessy. “But then that’s it over. On Coronation Street it’s constant, so while it might not be as much in terms of volume per hour, there’s a lot more hours of actual recording going on.” Another file-based multi-camera production
workflow is in place at the ten-acre site in Childwall, Liverpool that is the home to Hollyoaks. Producer Lime Pictures called in Root 6 to update the existing file-based SD system to a more efficient HD workflow to take full advantage of the Sony XDCAM HD cameras used on the teen drama.
HOLLYOAKS GOES TAPELESS Hollyoaks is shot in and around the buildings that used to be the set for Grange Hill. Some of the classrooms are machine rooms, some edit suites, other are studios. According to Root 6 co-founder/ director Rupert Watson, Lime Pictures has two different types of setup in place for filming. “They’ve got two-camera positions and three- camera positions around the grounds, for permanent locations like the bar, with fibre optic cable running around the school to those positions. Anything that isn’t near a fibre hook-up they shoot as a single camera – or two camera – shoot with XDCAM HD cameras.” Root 6’s remit was to enable Lime Pictures to
capture HD in real-time to a storage area network (an Apple xSAN). “We provided Lime with a software product called Sienna,” explains Watson. “This works with a number of PictureReady servers that capture the video output from the cameras at various studio positions and from the gallery.” “We changed the recording format to QuickTime
and they capture now using the PictureReady servers” explains Watson. “They can playback into Final Cut Pro and edit the resulting files very quickly, if not while they’re recording them.” Anything that has been shot on XDCAM cameras can be ingested via another server, which the Final Cut editors can also access via the xSAN. “XDCAM is an excellent acquisition codec,”
adds Watson, pointing out the ability to mix ProRes from the live capture and XDCAM from the single cameras effectively in the timeline.
THE USEFULNESS OF META DATA “This ingest control software can control multiple PictureReady servers, so can effectively create a multi-camera capture, all of them with meta data applied,” explains Watson. “So if you type in Scene
32 theproducer Autumn 2010
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