As Green Rock grew moving into 2011, further expansion was needed – this required a new premises. As such, MediaPros were enlisted again to consult on the physical and workflow design and installation for the new premises, close to Tottenham Court Road. Simon Rigden Green, Director of Green Rock said “Having MediaPros as part of the move enabled me to dedicate my time more to the logistics of the move, as well as project scheduling to give the clients as little disruption to the production process as possible – they’ve been a great help in taking the technical worry completely out of the move process”.
With the move marking a new era for Green Rock, the technical upgrade was quite ambitious – not only creating another two edit suites, but also (due to the building layout) a high level of connectivity between
“With Green Rock being so technically fearless…we decided to go for something a little different”.
with the source being generated from either any machine on the network or yet another iPad!
all suites over various mediums needed some very careful planning and a high level of ingenuity. Simon’s “grand plan” was for every suite to have the ability to connect to every other suite (including the custom- built VO booth) over any medium at any time – including HD-SDI for artist video monitoring, XLR for audio, playback for scripts/prompting and inter-suite communication and talkback. James commented, “In any other situation, we’d have gone for some of the staple products of the industry, but with Green Rock being so technically fearless… we decided to go for something a little different”.
On the hardware side, HD-SDI switching to allow video reference playback from any suite to the VO booth is accomplished using a Kramer VS-81HD that allows any operator to “take control” of the HD-SDI feed via a simple web interface over Ethernet. Live Audio monitoring is accomplished utilizing the SDI feed and headphone breakout socket on the Datavideo artist viewing monitor in the VO booth. XLR Switching for the Voiceover mic is the only part of the workflow that’s accomplished in the “old skool” way of a simple machine-room based patch bay.
The most interesting part is how line-of-sight to the VO booth from each suite is accomplished – Apple’s Facetime has been employed in each suite via the use of iPads, with an iPad mounted in the VO booth for the artist’s use, as well as roaming iPads for directors and producers to either “look in” on the artist, or communicate with any suite at any time. This allows “any room, any time” communication without the need to have a static talkback system. Simon remarked “it is an incredibly flexible way of allowing anyone in the building to talk to anyone else in the building within seconds, regardless of where they are or what they’re doing. This allows directors to literally “be in- front” of the artist, which results in a much more comfortable feeling of communication. Everyone loves how it makes Voiceovers much more fun!”. In addition to this, the iPad positioned in the VO booth is also used to display scripts/prompting,
In addition, a complete upgrade to Apple’s Lion operating system with XSAN v2.3 and Final Cut Pro X for editorial was installed – seen as somewhat of a controversial choice by some, MediaPros and Green Rock had a great deal of faith in Apple having been on Final Cut NLE systems from the start - with the new 10.0.1 update and the promise of new features in early 2012, it seems the choice has paid off. Green Rock can now utilize the blazing fast editorial workflow Final Cut Pro X allows, as well as the ability for full XSAN integration for shared projects and media. In addition, proper Media Stems audio export via the use of Roles tags, GPU- accelerated support and with Lion – full screen view have also been included. As a result, Green Rock’s XSAN storage has now grown to 64Tb of online storage to handle the influx of new projects, with Object Matrix’s MatrixStore system providing a seamless and secure nearline backup copy.
For more information about Green Rock, please contact: 0207 833 2277 or email
info@greenrock.tv www.greenrock.tv
MediaPros provides hardware and software sales, consultation, installation, workflow design and support contracts for the professional Audio and Video industries.
T: 0208 400 9400 E:
info@mediapros.co.uk
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