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EXPOSING PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN WILDLIFE BEHAVIOURS USING TECH BY MONICA HECK


Technology without fi eld craft and knowledge is unlikely to get you the shot when it comes to fi lming wildlife, according to Jeff Wilson, a trailblazer in the natural history world at the BBC and now at the multi-award-winning Silverback Films. Technology was nonetheless key to the delivery of some of the most arresting scenes of his latest BBC series Parenthood, including a night-time sequence of a lion attack in the dense bush of Ruaha National Park in Tanzania. “Without it there is no way to fi lm at night, track animals and not put yourself in danger.” “When planning such a documentary, you want to balance crowd pleasers like lions and elephants with stories that haven’t been fi lmed before because the technology wasn’t up to scratch,” he said, noting that equipment is rarely designed for such a niche market.


(L-R): Host Pim Niesten and Jeff Wilson To capture a hippo scene,


Wilson used a Merlin infrared camera housed inside a Shotover F1 gimbal, a previously unseen combination. “Working with a heat signature, we weren’t using available light and could see through plants. It was still 35


degrees at night, the camera was power hungry and generating its own heat, so we had to open its housing, thus exposing it to dust. The parameters were working against us, but we fi lmed a behaviour people rarely see, telling the story about the risk and


reward a mother will go through to raise her young.” In Namibia, Wilson used Laowa


probe lenses combined with Nikon 1:1 macro lenses to fi lm previously unseen behaviour by young social spiders cannibalising their mother, a scene he is very proud of.


DATA, RELIABILITY AND LATENCY A WIN FOR LIVE SPORTS BY MONICA HECK


Resilient systems, redundancy and proactive monitoring of systems are key to the successful delivery of major live sports and entertainment events across international regions, according to Sudheer Sirivara, EVP at Warner Bros. Discovery, speaking on the Showcase Theatre yesterday. High-concurrency single live events, such as English Premier League football or March Madness college basketball, draw in several million users. “You need an infrastructure that is provisioned for scale and can detect approaching spikes, and delivery must be scalable too. How you’re enabling enough capacity around CDNs is important,” he said. Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is often overlooked, according to Sirivara, who underlined the need


(L-R): Moderator Luciano Escudero, VP Media & Entertainment AI Studio, Globant; Lee Wright; Sudheer Sirivara


for fail-open strategies to ensure live streams continue to run in case of failure. Conversely, the Paris Olympics


presented a peak of 64 concurrent events, each in 24 different languages, time-synchronised with commentators, a huge operational challenge. “We need the right operations playbook, the setting and QC of the streams and the


ability to deliver at scale without compromising quality,” he said. Resiliency is about tolerating transients, and redundancy in the fi rst mile is crucial, according to Sirivara who outlined an incident at the Opening Ceremony in Paris where his team switched the primary signal path to London during a rainstorm. For F1, addressing the


acquisition latency that challenges its real-time platforms was central to its partnership with Globant. “We developed a new tool called Team CDS that allows our teams to consume their onboard camera feeds in almost real time to give insights and support decision making,” said Lee Wright, Associate Director of IT at Formula 1.


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