RHS CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW | BROADCAST STORY
newly-built truck came straight to site from its acceptance testing, having been built by Neil Wilson, with integration in house by Lee Wright, Timeline’s senior satellite engineer, and its next job was BBC’s Springwatch . Although a fairly standard wireless set-up was used this year, the hope is that a move to H.265 coding could take place shortly, enabling picture quality to be improved still further. “We did trial it very briefly,” says Simon, “and hopefully next year we’ll be able to implement it. Other than this we work with a fairly standard radio camera set-up. Because of the size of the site we have several remote receive sites connected on fibre optic, which operate via a combination of MRC switching in the receivers and also via RF matrix switching. This way we can make sure we get the best possible signals in to the receivers from the different sites that the teams go to.” There are two main camera teams, with three cameras in one and two cameras in the other. “We take radio signals from all the cameras individually,” explains Simon, “but also feed back to the team’s feeds of Autocue and reverse vision via radio link, which is then split out to the members of each team, including the sound crew.” The RF kit was augmented by full camera control via Videosys, using OEM remote control panels. This offered a good level of control for the vision operators in the scanner. Four cameras can be controlled on each system set up, so at Chelsea Timeline were running two systems. Sony PXW-Z450 UHDs were the cameras of choice, partnered in the main with Fujinon wide angle lenses. “We use a wide range of Fujinon’s UHD lenses: UA13, UA14, UA22, UA24 and UA80,” says Adam Bevis-Knowles, Timeline’s camera manager. ‘We’ve been pioneering 4K technology using Fujinon lenses with Sony cameras at sporting events such as the UEFA
Champions League Final and the IAAF World Athletics Championships. “The Fujinon UA80x9 is my favourite lens. It offers incredibly sharp pictures coupled with real control, and you get incredible precision on the focus control that I simply haven’t found anywhere else. The ramping area on the Fujinon UA80 is also minimal and virtually unnoticeable. “What we value most is Fujinon’s outstanding customer service and support. No matter where I am in the world, I know I can get the support I need should any issues arise. You’ll always split hairs between people’s views on a lens – optically or usability – but you can’t beat Fujinon’s customer service. It’s the characteristic that means we choose their lenses.’ Although the production at Chelsea was in HD, the quality of the UHD cameras has been noticeable. “The picture quality has been really good from the 450s,” says Simon. “Everybody has noticed how sharp the images are. Even using the same transmitter infrastructure that we’ve used previously, the picture quality has taken a step up.” Timeline TV is a company with its sights set firmly on the future, and it’s certainly not content to rest on its laurels. With the drive towards ever higher broadcast quality unstoppable, the search will be ongoing to come up with the means to deliver the footage that will service the next generation of HDTVs.
IMAGES The Timeline team had the job of producing a studio show in an outside environment.
says Martin. “Each area was soundproofed to enable it to work separately. This space could also be used as a separate production area, with sound and vision galleries. It ensured the truck had a lot more flexibility. There was also a dedicated talkback cabin on site at Chelsea to deal with all the radios, with 90 handheld units being used by the teams, working over eight talkback channels – a mixture of Tait Communications base stations and Motorola handsets. Besides the nine edit stations, there were also three ingest points, to take in material from the PSC crews. WORKING WITH WIRELESS The Chelsea Flower Show is a large site to cover in RF terms, and making sure the antennas were in the right places created a few issues for the team. “The environment at Chelsea is particularly demanding, with high crowd numbers and limited space between the exhibits,” says Simon Fell. “Using radio-cameras provided the production team with great positional flexibility without the safety hazard of trailing cables. The quantity of people, showground infrastructure and heavily tree-lined areas could all have posed a challenge, but the Timeline RF team is very experienced in deploying radio-cameras in a wide variety of locations, so engineered an appropriate diverse antenna array to mitigate any problems.” Central to everything was the RF3 truck, working on its first ever production. Identical to RF2, which was introduced for the Harry/Meghan royal wedding OB, both differ from the larger RF1, which is a mixed UHD production truck. The
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SPECIAL THANKS
Many thanks to SVG Europe (ww.svgeurope.org) for
permission to use extracts from their Chelsea Flower Show feature.
DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 8 43
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