Blackmagic Design announced that China’s online video service provider, LeTV, live streamed Chinese rock star Wang Feng’s concert at Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, using a large number of Blackmagic Design products.
LeTV produced the event using Blackmagic Design’s ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K switchers, ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panels, ATEM Studio Converters and ATEM Camera Converters. Also used during the production were Blackmagic Design’s SmartView monitors, HyperDeck Studio Pro, HDLink Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
Ten digital film cameras with PL lenses were deployed for the concert, with each camera equipped with an ATEM Camera Converter, which converted the SDI output of the camera to optical fiber. All camera feeds were transferred via optical fiber to an array of ATEM Studio Converters, which converted the optical fiber to SDI feeds again and sent them to an ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K switcher controlled by an ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel.
”Blackmagic Design’s optical fiber based live production solution doesn’t need cumbersome hybrid cables, because one optical fiber cable is enough to transfer video, talkback and Tally between a camera and the switcher and it can reach locations which are too far for a coaxial cable. Plus, more and more modern stadiums have built in optical fiber networks, which makes optical fiber cabling very convenient,” said Li Mingyue, engineer of Oxygentec, who took care of the live production system design and technical support for this concert.
Unlike traditional live productions, the production team also incorporated on set grading to their workflow according to the unique characteristics of shooting concerts. “The diverse light sources and colors on the stage and high contrast shots go far beyond the Rec. 709 space that is used by traditional television productions. The digital film cameras for Wang Feng’s concert chose S-Log 3 profile for the widest possible color space and latitude, which required on set color management during the live production,” said Hua Cheng, CEO of Homeboy Cine Studio, who was tasked with on set color management for the concert.
“We built our Homeboy Color On Set live color management solution around Blackmagic Design’s HDLink Pro LUT box and Pomfort’s LiveGrade software tool,” explained Hua. “During the live production, the PGM feed went to the HDLink Pro box and we selected and loaded the film print emulation LUT from LiveGrade on a laptop computer into HDLink Pro, which we had previously built in DaVinci Resolve and made adjustments when needed.The graded PGM with a film look would go out through the loop through output of HDLink Pro.”
”With this on set color management solution, not only were we able to correct the colors of the image, but also add any creative look the director wanted in real time. For example, when the singer sang a song about memory, we made the color fade away gradually. This enriches the techniques of live production and brings more possibilities, ideal for art performances like music concerts.”
The graded PGM was sent to another ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K, which was used to insert logo and song titles using the included free software control panel and control the audio from the external mixer using the free software audio mixer. From there the PGM feed with the logo, song titles and live audio was sent to LeTV’s live streaming system, which handled live streams to the Internet audience via its website. All monitoring were handled by two SmartView HD monitors and a SmartView Duo monitor. An HD master was also recorded using Blackmagic Design’s HyperDeck Studio Pro SSD recorder.
LeTV set the “ticket” price at 30 yuan ($4.9) and collected more than 75,000 paid accesses to the concert’s live webcast and full length replay.
Resources:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com
Featured Image
