November 2013
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TVBEurope 47 The Workflow
Maidstone Studios: indy upgrades to centre stage
With an HD upgrade, Maidstone Studios hopes to become the go to location for near-London TV production. Neal Romanek visited the facility and talked with CEO Rowland Kinch about the indy studio’s present and future
LOCATED AN hour’s drive from London in Maidstone, Kent, Maidstone Studios has been the occasional home of children’s programming and gameshows, including Take Me Out. But with the closing of the BBC’s Television Centre, demand for Maidstone’s stages has exploded. The facility had been host to HD shows on an ad hoc basis, but the new wave of interest has pushed the studio to invest in a full upgrade. Maidstone CEO Rowland Kinch began to see that a full HD transition was inevitable: “We started to tip past the model of Pinewood — just an empty stage where they effectively bring in OB.
Rowland Kinch: “Maybe our day has finally come”
Alastair Smith, Maidstone’s technical manager, who supervised the HD upgrade, “And there still aren’t that many HD channels to watch.” Smith observes that while broadcasters
may get to watch pure, uncompressed HD in the studio, the experience of the viewer is often very different, “When you get HD to the home, it’s been crushed. So with 4K, it’s going to be a while before you can get it into the front room.” Kinch thinks it will be some time
Maidstone’s big score this year was becoming the broadcast home to Later… with Jools Holland
“Now budgets are as tight as hell and there’s going to be resistance [to UHD). And if it’s going to be 10 times the cost? No, everyone’s going to laugh it out of court”
Rowland Kinch
For each HD show, we used to hire in a router and all the bits and pieces. It was a huge plug up and a massive amount of work. “So we went out and bought some of the big bits of glue that we don’t want to hire in. We didn’t want to touch cameras, because they’re flavour of the week or flavour of the show, but we have pulled out the stops in terms of the major HD upgrades.” The upgrade consisted primarily of kit
from Miranda Technologies. Included were two NVISION 8140 hybrid routers, dual NVISION 9000 control systems, two sets of Densité 3 frames populated with multiple Miranda Kaleido-Modular multiviewer cards and the XVP-3901 3Gbps/HD/SD up, down and cross- conversion platform. The hardware is
expandable to take into account any of Maidstone’s future needs. The studio upgrades also included a new Sony MVS 6530 production switcher and Studer mixing console. Maidstone’s big score this year was becoming the broadcast home to Later… with Jools Holland — and the studio will also host Jools Holland’s live New Year’s show, Hootenanny. “Landing probably the world’s premiere live music show is a big deal for us,” says Kinch, “It’s full live, no delay. And the amount of capability and the way we can work with the Miranda Nvision are amazing. It’s night and day.” For Kinch, the HD upgrade is essential to securing future business. “We’ve always been fighting for regular shows, then with the advent of Television Centre
Cloud and connection
WHILE MAIDSTONE Studios has upgraded some features of its facility, at least one offering is at the leading edge: the studio has a formidable data centre. “We’ve got five POP’s and 90GB of edge transit,” says Rowland Kinch. “There are some massive synergies here as far as our fibre connectivity, and some of the skillsets from my network engineers in the IP world start to come across into the studio. Owning a data centre means you start to understand the level two stuff, so we can
provide a lot of help. And there is discussion here about having an in-house cloud.” Technical manager Smith notes that although Maidstone’s data capabilities have allowed it to expand its service, not everyone has been ready to use it: “We once offered to take the output of an EVS straight up to the servers of a post house in London. But then the post house said ‘We haven’t done that before’. It shows you just how behind the curve some of the guys are, in real terms,” Kinch adds.
shutting, our phone has been off the hook. All of a sudden people had to find homes because they lost eight studios in central London. The level of interest quadrupled. ITV is now forming a partnership with us to give overflow capacity, so maybe our day has finally come instead of being a bit of an also- ran that turns up twice a year.”
An Ultra HD future? With all the chatter of a move to 4K production, it’s easy to forget that many facilities are only now switching to HD. “SD is still very big out there,” notes
before a good business case can be made for 4K/Ultra HD upgrades. “We watched clearly the transition from SD to HD, and everyone sat on the fence and sat on the fence, until finally they were forced to do something. Now budgets are as tight as hell and there’s going to be resistance. And if it’s going to be 10 times the cost? No, everyone’s going to laugh it out of court.” Kinch had the 4K conversation with
Miranda, wanting to ensure that the Maidstone upgrade was state of the art. “They came out with all the obvious reasons why you couldn’t do it yet, issues that still needed to be sorted out with 4K, because obviously they are looking at it seriously. There is a tipping point for everything, but I think it’s still five years off.”
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