In December 2018 we were approached and asked if we would like to provide Outside Broadcast Facilities for the Capital Jingle Bell Ball 2018 Live Stream. The Jingle Bell Ball is one of Capital’s biggest events of the year where artists which include Little Mix, Jason Derulo, Cheryl, Jess Glynne amongst many others and last year we achieved over 1.2 Million hits.
This job is one of our most challenging jobs of the year as it has so many different requirements that we have to take into account. There are over 10 Edit Suites running for 10 Hours a day, 10 ENG Crews our shooting VT’s and a huge multicamera OB covering the action on the main stage which are all networked into our truck where we act as a hub to mix all of the elements together and create a 4hr live programme.
The workflow is as follows:
Feeds:
Stage TX
Stage ISO’s
Edit World (Networked EVS)
All of the above feeds are all over the 02 they are fed back to the truck over Fibre. A network is made between “Edit World” and “OB Truck” to allow content to be out into our system easily. Once everything hits the truck its all fed into the Vision Mixer where the director works his magic and adds all of the graphic elements ready for broadcast.
You would have thought that that would be enough on our plates… but no! Once this is all put together we then have the task of ensuring the feed goes out to the world on a main and backup path offering the client layers of redundancy should anything go wrong with the primary stream.
The main path goes out of the truck and converted back into Fibre and sent to SIS in Milton Keynes who take our feed and send it into two separate encoders.
The backup path once again goes out of the truck over fibre to our KA/4G Uplink vehicle which is parked up outside of the 02. The truck we have has a KA SAT Dish on the roof and a 4K bonded router which combines the two connections into one reliable connection and then encodes the video before sending out to the world.
And once that is all complete – the job is done!
