Broadcast TECH PRODUCTION CLOSE THE TRAINING GAP
Graham Reed warns of a bleak future for the industry unless more is invested in training
cameraman who couldn’t get a picture on his monitor; he
I
didn’t realise that he was trying to feed an SDI monitor with an HD-SDI signal, and he had no idea how to change the output on the camera. It made me wonder: if he
didn’t understand something that simple, what else didn’t he know? Yet he was being employed as a cameraman. Last week, another cameraman asked
‘I am concerned that low standards are becoming the norm’
me how he could learn to use a camera pedestal. Not very long ago, when I
was working in a studio as a light- ing director, the playback of the pre-record pictures looked under- exposed. I asked the VT record person if she had done the line-up. Her reply was: “What’s a line-up?”
I suspect that the production
manager who employed her did not think there was more to operating a VT machine than just pushing the play and record buttons. Perhaps this particular VT op
was cheaper and the production manager did not think there was any need to pay for a trained person. But the results were visible on screen at a cost to the
www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils
recently met a
programme, the audience and the channel.
When I see badly exposed and
framed pictures on TV, I want to know why. Are the operators not trained? Who taught them? And who booked them? As a freelance lighting camera- man, I have a great interest in the level of skill in our industry and I am concerned at the increasingly low standards we see on our screens; and, even worse, how low standards are becoming the norm. The TV industry is suffering
from a lack of training and unless there is more investment in this area, the future looks bleak. There are courses run by some of the professional organ- isations – I am in the Guild of Television Cameramen, which runs workshops and is very supportive of its members. There is also the Society of TV Lighting Directors and the Vision Mixers Guild, both of which help with training. For those new to the industry, I think the best way to learn is to be motivated and go on as many courses as possible – especially full-time courses – and network like mad. The Indie Training Fund (ITF)
is already supported by some production companies, but if it was supported by all large pro- duction companies and the UK’s broadcasters, it could take on a much larger role in training production personnel. Indeed, if it had just 1% of BSkyB’s £878m annual profit, the skills base of the TV industry would be assured. ➤ Graham Reed is a freelance lighting cameraman and trainer
POST-PRODUCTION TIME FOR A DIGITAL REVIEW
Neil Hatton argues that budgets need to catch up with tapeless workflows and file-based storage
the rushes coming into post now are tapeless, and we are
N
no longer just handling low-res proxy media for the duration of an offline edit. Instead, facilities have to securely store rushes in their native HD resolution for the duration of the project – and often beyond. Gigabytes have been replaced
by terabytes and the traffic demands on our internal data networks continue to rise. Yet some clients still expect storage to be thrown in as part of a com- petitive offline rate. So who is going to pay for this investment? A producer once told me that
tapeless rushes would mean that digitising costs could be struck from his budget. Tapeless ingest may be quicker than real-time tape digitising and doesn’t need expen- sive VTRs, but it’s not instant and it doesn’t happen by magic. Digitising could be taught to junior operators in a matter of days but we now need expert data wranglers to deal with the differ- ent workflows and problems thrown up by the many new cam- era formats. It costs facilities more to employ and train these highly skilled operators, so who will pay for this, particularly as ingest and data wrangling lines were never previously in the budget? Many clients still request
quotes for tapeless projects based on legacy tape workflow budgets that refer to digitising, tape con- form and offline, with a storage allowance included for free as a sweetener. Budget templates
early all
often lack line items for the real costs of ingest, vast data storage during and after production, remote viewing of rushes, meta- data tagging and logging, digital delivery of final masters and long-term LTO archiving of media. All these are essential for end-to-end tapeless production. It’s time for the business prac-
tices to catch up with the techno- logical changes via an overhaul of the sub-headings in the post-pro- duction schedule of commonly used budget templates. The Digital Production Partnership could play an important role in this review. Its remit from broadcasters to
‘Tapeless ingest may be quicker, but it doesn’t happen by magic’
champion best practice gives it the influence to introduce a new universal budget template that accurately represents the new cost centres of tapeless production. Once producers can relate
to the cost and value of these services, post houses will be able to develop new business models and make much easier decisions about capital expenditure and training. They will be able to see the return on investment directly and make reasonable charges that relate to the costs of these services, rather than trying to hide them as overheads in other budget lines. ➤ Neil Hatton is chief executive of Azimuth Post Production and chair of UK Screen’s Technical Working Group
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