WATCHING NATURE
pringwatch , Autumnwatch and Winterwatch are some of the BBC ’s biggest live productions. The shows feature live studio and on- location content of British wildlife and natural habitats across different parts of the country. Springwatch , which runs in June, is the series’ centrepiece, but when plans were being drawn up for this year ’s broadcast, the UK was in the early stages of lockdown. There was discussion about pre-recording the show, but the producers were intent on finding a way to keep it live. Robert Dawes, senior research engineer of BBC R&D, says: “We had to quickly change our system from one based on-site in the outside broadcast truck to one that operated remotely in the cloud.” Springwatch is broadcast three days a week for three weeks and uses up to 30 camera feeds, many giving rarely seen views, like the inside of bird nests. Getting live feeds from a large number of locations is a regular technical challenge for the team in any year, but this year ’s production also had to find a way of feeding the live presentation of its four remote presenters. Satellite links have been used in the past, but that proved too costly when each presenter was forced to broadcast from their own local region. In the event, two presenter links were satellite, and two were a mix of LiveU cellular and IP live streaming. OB partner Timeline Television set up a gallery at the BBC’s Ealing Studios to receive all incoming links. This main control area housed the director, vision mixer and the script supervisor – all socially distanced. A sound supervisor and EVS operator worked in an adjacent area. The show’s producers worked from home and were able to view Timeline’s virtual gallery through remote access over IP. Aside from cameras in nest boxes and hides, Springwatch cameras were joined by feeds from the likes of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Dorset Wildlife Trust, which were offered as an additional public stream. The production ramped up its use of computer vision to automate logging of these rushes, which would otherwise have added to the show’s already high shoot ratio. “With no extra staff or facilities available to monitor and record the partner cameras, we investigated d how we could apply technology to perform tasks
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