FEED Summer 2021 Newsletter

ROBERT ERICKSON: It comes down to efficiency and duty cycle.When you look at college football or college baseball, you might have 70 or 80 games a day. Networks, such as ESPN, traditionally fly a crew to every single production.You want to do a baseball game: you get a truck, you fly in a crew.You want to do another baseball game: you get another truck, you fly in another crew.They are there for a two-hour production, then go back to their hotel room – expense a lot of food and alcohol – before flying back home the next day. But remote production introduces efficiency. What happens if I don’t have to fly in those crews? What if I can build a hub in LA, Charlotte or London? In that hub, I can assemble a large staff with a technical director, audio engineer, graphics operator, producer and assistant director. All those people can do one show.They can take a break and walk back into that same studio an hour later for another show.You can do back-to-back shows, and that capital asset you invested millions of dollars in can have as much as an 80% usage cycle. CLAIREWILKIE: I’m not an engineer. I’m a girl with a vision. I find remote production really exciting. I love live production and coming up with challenging, mad ideas. Remote production opens up so much freedom for that. We use a lot of Blackmagic Design kit that proves scalable and modular. On top of that, we don’t have a legacy of big broadcast trucks – we are not one of those behemoth companies. With remote production, you really are unlimited in what you can do now.With the tech becoming NEAL ROMANEK: What are the real benefits to doing production in this distributed way?

smaller, it means a more level playing field, and this is something that’s necessary.

TIM PUSCHKEIT: Even though I’ve been working in this business a while, sometimes I still think it’s unreal that you can operate cameras located in Sydney or Paris from London or Germany. But it’s our bread and butter now – and that will be the future. Remote production does give you more challenges, requiring clearer communication. The camera operator may be sitting in a different time zone, speaking a different language. It’s not like doing things face to face, so you need to define your standards. NORBERT PAQUET: Distributed production is modular.You put the resources where they need to be. But considering where you place the different building blocks of the production process is important.That is the acquisition, production and processing of the content, as well as distribution, plus the people required for the production. A director might appreciate working close to his home if the stadium is far away. But others prefer to go the stadium to see the atmosphere and talk to their camera operators face to face.There is that flexibility with the remote production model; you can put the right people in the right places, based on the production workflow you want to achieve. “I LOVE LIVE

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PRODUCTIONAND COMING UPWITH CHALLENGING, MAD IDEAS”

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