With the dust having settled on the coalition and the budget now due, Shotoku Broadcast Systems is highlighting its role in supplying remote camera control systems to meet, and exceed, the challenging demands and strict requirements of the 10-hour live broadcasts undertaken by the BBC and ITN.
The rapidly moving events and complex live productions called for maximum flexibility and reliability, ease of use, and exceptional on-air movement. Both national broadcasters used the Shotoku TR-T touch panel system to facilitate total multicamera control for fast and accurate positioning of Shotoku’s specialist pan and tilt heads or legacy third party heads.
Danny Popkin, BBC Studios and Post Production Technical Development Manager said: “The Virtual studio area, which covered approximately one quarter of the Studio One floor area at Television Centre, had a number of challenges that made it impossible to use conventionally mounted cameras to obtain the specific shots required by the director. These camera positions were obtained using slung remote pan and tilt heads with touchscreen control for shot selection. The TG-27 heads with integrated VR tracking technology meant they could be fully integrated on the large VR set we used for presentation of the live election data.”
Paul Flook, Head of Broadcast Engineering, ITN added that: “We have been using Shotoku control systems for our daily national news broadcasts on ITV, so we knew we could rely on the system to meet the demands of our live through-the-night Election 2010 coverage.“
The TR-T control system uses an intuitive user interface with thumbnail video images representing numerous stored shot positions. The highly configurable screen layout enables complete control of all cameras in the system in a way that best suits the operator and the program format. True multi-camera support allowing simultaneous on-air quality movement of up to 16 cameras is supported by all Shotoku systems. A distributed architecture and a simple, resilient, Ethernet control network means that even the most critical live broadcasts can rely on the system to provide the best possible performance at all times.
