As Live Production Unit - Del's Workshop 2

In todays session we were not in our main lecture room, we were in studio 2 as we are having a more hands on and practical workshop. We started off getting into groups of 3 and setting the equipment up which included a camera, tripod and dolly. Once turned on we wheeled all the cameras together and put them in a line plugging in a cable each into the SDI out. This cable enabled the cameras to be connected into a live feed that could be controlled via a mixer in the gallery.

Our first lesson was learning how to get all the camera to get the same white balance and colour grade so that when we shoot they will all look the same in terms of picture. We zoomed into a test board and pushed the white balance button to enable all the cameras to sync up the same. Once this was done we all had a go of learning different shots making sure we used the iris and focus ring to all get good picture. We advanced this by trying to keep the focus on a person as they moved about including moving closer and away from the camera. This was a great lesson for me as I have not had a chance in previous projects to be really hands on with the cameras.

Once we all felt comfortable with this we moved on to the gallery. It's here that we learned a variety of different things. We first went into the sound room where Del taught us about the racks. I had not known what this was before so it was interesting for me to hear that you can manually control the cameras focus and iris from a different room. We then moved into the vision room where we could see all the cameras pictures through the TV monitors. Del then taught us how to use the vision mixer which showed how to transmit pictures from the preview monitor to the transmission monitor. We also learnt how to mix which gave a dissolve effect from one camera picture to another.

I felt I learnt a lot from this lesson and being a director I can understand what the vision mixer and camera operators have to go through in order to get what I want on the live show.