Envy to post-produce The Voice at Windmill Street

Broadcast

Envy has taken over from Evolutions as the picture and audio post-production home for BBC talent show The Voice UK’s second series. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/envy-to-post-produce-the-voice-at-windmill-street/5048983.article

The Wall to Wall production will take over eight of Envy’s cutting rooms at its new Windmill Street base, with finishing at its Rathbone Place facility.

The Voice UK is due to TX in 2013. “It shows that we are moving further into Saturday night entertainment, which we have not done for a while. It is a genre we want to do more of,” said Envy managing director Dave Cadle.

“Together with the contract to post Top Gear series 19, it’s a big plus for us.”

Envy’s 7,000 sq ft Windmill Street building, which officially opened at the beginning of the month, represents a £2m investment. It has 24 rooms, each equipped with Avid Media Composer running on an Isis 5000 with 96TB of storage.

The building houses a Baselight, Envy’s fourth, with Dolby PRM 4200 LCD and the company’s sixth Avid Symphony, linked to an additional 32TB of Isis storage costing £100,000.

Senior colourist Tim Waller has arrived from Molinare and Jonathan Davies, ex-MPC, is the new head of commercials production.

They join 25 new hires and 15 existing staff promoted to run the operation. It is the fifth offshoot of the facility in addition to Envy’s Rathbone Place, Holden House, Margaret Street and Foley Street sites.

Envy’s turnover for the past year was £13.2m and it plans to spend £1.6m in 2013 on kit for VFX, offline and online.

BBC experiments with 3D ‘snorkel’ for Hidden Kingdom

Broadcast 

The BBC has commissioned a unique device to capture 3D footage of small creatures in the wild for natural history series Hidden Kingdom.

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/bbc-experiments-with-3d-snorkel-for-hidden-kingdom/5048988.article

The ‘straightscope’ is a snorkel-type system with a wide-angle lens that attaches to the front of a camera to obtain extreme close-ups.

It is being built by optical specialist Peter Parks, who devised an original version for 2003 3D Imax fi lm Bugs!, subsequently winning a lifetime achievement Academy Award for his technological contribution to film-making.

“To depict the point of view of creatures the size of an ant, we needed a system that has a much smaller front end than a mirror rig,” said series producer and 3D director Mark Brownlow.

“The snorkel can ‘kiss’ the subject to make it look huge but the background remains in focus.”

Onsight is supplying a range of additional equipment including Freestyle rigs, Red Epics, twin Iconix mini-cams on a jib and a pair of Nikon D800 D-SLRs on a Hurricane rig for timelapse sequences.

The production is using a pair of Phantom Miro cameras fi lming at 1,000 frames a second for high-speed photography of chipmunks in North American forests.

“It reveals extraordinary, Matrixlike detail of the chipmunks fighting each other,” said Brownlow. “I don’t believe this has been seen before and it’s an experience that is not the same viewed in 2D. I want to push the throttle on the 3D and make it almost interactive.”

The 3 x 60-minute 2D series and 50-minute 3D single tracks groups of small animals including scorpions, beetles and marmosets in environments such as the Sonoran desert and Rio’s favelas.

BBC Worldwide is underwriting the BBC Natural History Unit and RTL co-production, which is scheduled for completion by November 2013.

Technicolor provides full post on Midsomer

Broadcast

http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/technicolor-provides-full-post-on-midsomer/5048985.article

Technicolor has supplied full picture post-production, mastering and tape deliverable services for series 15 of ITV drama Midsomer Murders.

The facility also provided ADR, sound post-production services, Foley recording, mixing and mastering for all but one of the series.

It began providing these services for producer Bentley Productions on the last two episodes of series 14.

“As self-contained feature-length dramas, Midsomer Murders had many different grading requirements,” said colourist Dan Coles.

“As a general rule, we are trying to create a continuity of warmth and contrast - rich in colour and vibrancy.”

Editor Simon Giblin said: “Each episode has varied visual-effect requirements. For example, one episode had a requirement for a total solar eclipse, which we generated within Avid DS using plug-ins and production-sourced material.”

Meduza merges 4K and 3D concept into Titan camera

Broadcast

Meduza Systems has begun shipping the Titan 3D, a single-stereo camera, with Berlin-based rental house Tectum taking first orders. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/news/meduza-merges-4k-and-3d-concept-into-titan-camera/5048773.article

Meduza made waves at NAB 2010 with its concept of a custom- isable, 4K and 3D camera in a single body, with its optics designed to be exchangeable with the camera body. That camera, the MK 1, was delayed subject to the development of the sensors, and the company turned its attention to an HD variant, the Titan.

The MK 1 concept has now been merged with Titan, explained chief executive Chris Cary. “The Titan delivers 1080-2K up to 60 frames a second using a standard head and a standard body. The next body for the camera will be for high- speed photography that allows the standard head to shoot up to 340fps [at 2K],” he said.

“The next head after that will have a 4K sensor, so the high- speed body will also be capable of 4K at high frame rates.”

Meduza has embarked on a tour to demonstrate the technology. Cary added: “We now have the camera to prove to indies and broadcasters how flexible shooting 3D TV can be.”

Titan weighs 5kg and features two HD 1080p CMOS sensors, with convergence claimed to be accu- rate to 1/1,000 of a degree. The unit can be operated with 3ality Technica wireless control hardware, 3Ality mobile apps or controllers from Preston and cmotion.

The body costs £35,000, the electronics £3,000 and a set of eight matched pair lenses £55,000.A rental package is around £2,000 a day.

ITVS’ Provision opens office in London

Broadcast 

ITV Studios’ kit rental subsidiary Provision is opening a London office to complement bases in Leeds and Manchester. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/news/-itvs-provision-opens-office-in-london/5048774.article

The office, located at ITV’s Television Centre, is initially aimed at servicing in-house ITV productions.

“We are looking to extend support to ITV’s factual department,” said sales and operations manager Danny Howarth. “All our stock is fluid, meaning that all of our offices have complete access to all of our inventory.”

Kit includes Arri Alexa and Canon C300 cameras, Arri Alura Zoom lenses, Sony OLED monitors and LED Lite Panel technology.

“We are constantly evaluating our investments and will look to add new technologies as demand arises,” he said.

Recent dramas supplied by Provision’s northern offices include Kudos’ Utopia for Channel 4, shot on Red Epics, and ITV’s Vera, shot on Alexa.

BVE North expects 20% boost

Broadcast

BVE North is expected to attract more than 3,000 visitors this year, a 20% increase on the inaugural 2011 event.

Manchester’s Central Complex will house 100 exhibitors, including 35 vendors new to the show, which takes place on 13-14 November. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/news/bve-north-expects-20-boost/5048772.article

“BVE North is about bringing together regional content and local talent with the latest industry information,” said marketing manager Amanda McCarthy. “Last year, 87% of visitors to BVE North did not visit the London event, so we are catering for a whole new market.”

She added: “The BBC is settled into MediaCityUK and more people are moving to the region to support local production. BVE North is about supporting that endeavour.”

A new series of informal round- table discussions, dubbed Skills Zone, are intended to aid the region’s freelance community in topics ranging from rights protection to job hunting.

Among the commissioners in attendance are UKTV commissioning editor for entertainment Helen Cooke and multiplatform commissioning lead at Channel 4 Louise Brown.

Several products will be making their debuts at the show, including the global launch of a trio of portable wireless technologies from Intratec, distributed by Holdan.

Bridge is a miniature on-camera Wi-Fi device that streams video up to 450Mbps over dis- tances of 250m; Bridge Duo is a radio unit capable of delivering live data streams over 500m; and WiFi Anywhere aggregates data from mobile networks to create a remote wireless hotspot.

“We’ve seen wireless encoding and streaming take off in the past 12 months,” said Holdan technical manager Richard Payne. “We are also making BVE North the UK launchpad for the Teradek Bolt, which is a £1,300 transmitter and receiver of uncompressed HD SDI for wireless working up to 100m.

“The delay is just 2 milli- seconds and it supports 1080p. There is nothing comparable on the market.”

Other products making their UK debut at the show include NewTek’s TriCaster 8000, a live production and streaming system for up to eight cameras; Studer by Harman’s compact audio console Vista 1; the Solaris LED energy-saving spotlight from Ianiro; and the Photron SA-X from Slowmo, which can record 1K res- olutions at 20,000 fps.

Sony shifts towards higher resolution with 4K cameras

Broadcast

Sony is to launch two 4K cameras, the PMW-F5 aimed at TV drama and mainstream TV production and the PMW-F55 targeted at high-end drama and commercials. http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/news/sony-shifts-towards-higher-resolution-with-4k-cameras/5048479.article

Both will be available from February and sport a new 4K-capable codec, XAVC. The two cameras are intended to help the industry make the transition towards higher resolution production.

Sony head of AV media Olivier Bovis said: “MPEG 2 is the most widely used codec today, but if you want to cover 50-60p production, or 4K, or high frame rates, then you need something different. This is our response.”

Bovis added: “The XAVC can do proxy, HD and 4K recording on a single chipset. It will become the heart of a lot of [Sony] future products. The majority of our clients still have a lot of legacy HD and even DV requirements, so a lot of people will shoot 4K for archive.”

The F5 will be able to shoot 4K at 60 frames a second compressed using XAVC recording to new SxS Pro+ cards. It has a large format Super 35 sensor and takes PL mount lenses. The addition of a new recorder, R5, will enable Raw 4K at 120fps from the camera.

Manufacturers including Avid, Adobe, Grass Valley and Codex plan to implement support for the cameras on launch. For viewing, Sony is releasing a 30-inch 4K LCD monitor, the SRM-3000. The model succeeds, but does not replace, the PWM-F3 and is being seen as a response to Canon’s C300 and C500 cameras by some rental houses.