UHD just to down-convert, because the conversion processes themselves put in various artefacts.” The 2018 Chelsea Flower Show was the first of a four-year contract, and because Timeline’s truck is capable of UHD there’s the possibility of shooting UHD down the line, particularly for archive material, and, probably more importantly, in HDR. KEEPING THINGS CLOSE Timeline would usually set up a large EVS area in UHD2, with two rows of EVS operations, but for Chelsea it replaced the back row with two edit suites. “It was All the edit suites fed into a small server room, and again this was a break from the norm, which would be to use the servers in the truck. But the truck had to leave two hours after the last Friday show for Moscow and the World Cup Finals, so it made more sense to build a separate room so that everything was in place on the Saturday. Footage was edited in one of the Avid suites and played out from a HDCam SR recording and playout system in Timeline’s new RF3 dedicated RF and uplink vehicle. The area in UHD2 at the back of the usual EVS area was refitted as two full edit areas. “This could either be run as one large room, two small rooms, or one small room with the rest of the area still as EVS,” decided that the two compile edits would be best in the truck,” says Martin. “They were close to the main production team, so they could just wander in and have a conversation rather than out to a Portakabin.”
The BBC produced about 14 hours of television from the Chelsea Flower Show, covering more than a week of programming, with up to three magazine- type shows per day, with live or as-live links. It wasn’t possible to do everything totally live, due to the difficulty in moving the crews and equipment around the site during a programme, so it was generally two or three live items with the rest either packages or as-live links. “It was unusual to be producing a studio show in an OB environment,” says Simon Fell, Timeline TV project manager, who was working as the RF Supervisor on the Chelsea Flower Show. “However, that was basically what we were asked to do.” Facilities provided by Timeline Television included There were also seven edit suites, plus two compile edits, all on Avid, with the compiles recorded to three EVS machines for playing into the programmes. Although Timeline was using its UHD2 truck, this year’s Chelsea Flower Show coverage was in HD 1080/50i. Martin Sexton is looking ahead, however, and foresees a time when this situation could change. “We covered the event using UHD cameras,” he says, “which upped the video quality significantly over previous years. Both the production and engineering side from the BBC were very happy with the new quality. There was no point in doing a three-camera open-air studio that overlooked the show grounds, two other multi-camera teams and ten Portable Single Camera (PSC) crews shooting recorded items.
DID YOU KNOW?
The Chelsea flower Show has run since 1913, with gaps for two world wars
We covered the event using UHD cameras, which upped the video quality significantly
42 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 8
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