WELCOME | High Definition magazine

Although X Factor, the popular UK talent/reality show, isn’t made or broadcast in high definition, it now definitely could be. Fountain Studios, from where the programmed is transmitted every Saturday, has made the HD transition in a £1.1 million upgrade to equipment and facilities. The equipment upgrade includes 10 Sony HDC1500 cameras and a Sony MVS 8000G video switcher. At the moment only a few projects going through the doors have taken advantage of the hike in resolution.

Fountain Studios is a unique place and space in the UK and possibly further afield. There are two studios available and they can be combined to serve up a cavernous 13,500 sq. ft, which is the space that X Factor currently uses (The BBC’s HD studio is only 10,000 sq. ft).

Early on in its life the studios were used to shoot the classic comedy series On The Buses and needed a huge double door to get a double decker bus in. 30 years on this huge entrance looks like uncanny foresight as it allows the rigging and de-rigging for shows like X Factor to be done in record times – five days to rig, two to de-rig.

Chris Cooper, Chief Engineer at Fountain Studios has been busy incorporating the new technology in between shows and in down time: “We wanted to be ready for when broadcasters wanted high definition. We are about 95% there, but for instance equipment like monitors haven’t been replaced yet because I’m not convinced the quality is there yet. We haven’t got a high definition route to the outside world yet either, we could achieve one with encoding but at the moment we don’t know which way to go.”

The shows that Fountain has already done in HD include the sitcom Clone but that was recorded to VTRs as was a football show. Chris also invested in a high definition version of the EVS server for play-ins and producing editing packages from the live feed.

100 miles up the M11 motorway in Norwich a similar high definition re-equipment process has happened at the old Anglia TV site. Called Epic, the now independent studios have spent £1.5 million on their refurbishment which includes six Sony HDC1500 cameras and a Thomson Grass Valley Kayak HD vision mixer in each of it’s three control rooms. Mark Wells and David Hazel, EPIC’s Director and Head of Engineering respectively were sure that a high definition refit was the only option open to them. “The idea was that EPIC would offer broadcast professionals the facilities that they would expect to find in any mainstream broadcast studio,” explains David Hazel. “And likewise, for the students we train, the idea was that we should familiarise them with the kind of kit that they might reasonably be expected to encounter when they joined the world of work after college. We could meet those twin demands – network production standards plus state-of-the-art education and training opportunities – only by going to high definition and a server-based workflow.”

Installation company Megahertz installed a Thomson K2 server, and worked with David Hazel and his team to integrate it with EPIC’s existing 60-Terabyte SAN. Apple Macintoshes in the three studios now have access to both the SAN and the production K2, which also integrates with EPIC’s existing Final Cut Pro and Avid editing systems. “We can play a finished file from the SAN into the K2, and then it’s immediately available to any one of the three studios directly through the vision mixer,” explains David Hazel. “And also, our editing facilities have full access to the SAN via the switcher. That releases the vision mixer from some of the load, which we thought was a good way to do it. Basically, you can ingest into the server or play out from the server any project to any of the studios”.