[Tech1] New Years Eve Drone show

[Mike Jordan]

I am sure my ex colleague from OBs wont mind me sharing this slightly technical information with you. An amazing set-up.
He is now one of the main guys at Timeline TV who were originally based (before expansion) at Ealing Television Film Studios!
Hope it isn’t TOOO techie!

Mike

It was a very bizarre programme to work on, so much effort for only 10 minutes of television. 
The RF aspects of the job alone was huge - I booked 350MHz of spectrum for it, satellite circuits between Wembley, Trinity Buoy Wharf (which we had to uplink from the south side of the O2 Arena due to clearance issues with the nearby airport, microwave links between St Magnus House (next to London Bridge) and the BT Tower for the main and backup circuits, and also IP links between St Magnus House and the Adelphi where we had a derig on the roof.

There were radio cameras on hoists at Richmond Terrace (for the Big Ben shot), St Michaels Church Wembley, Tokyngton Community Centre, Wembley, 
There were also radio cameras on HMS President (x2), City Hall, The Shard, as well as 2 either side of Trinity Buoy Wharf.
We should have had 2 Helicopters too, but they were not able to fly due to the low cloud base, and ended up stuck at Redhill.
They would have been received at St Magnus House, Trinity Buoy Wharf and Wembley.

The paperwork for the job took forever, and I hope I never need to do a RAMS for the Shard ever again to use the 87th (and top) floor.
The overall Method Statement for the lighting boys and us ran to 81 pages.

I'm glad it was well received - and I watched it myself when I got home after the derig at 4am, and opened a beer.......

And another post

There is another note to add, and that's the whole programme was driven by the clock, as is fitting on NYE.
If the helicopters were flying then they didn't need production talkback, as they both would have flown into Westminster, and then one to the O2 Arena, and the other to Wembley.
In the 10 minutes they could only offer the shots that were scripted.

Latency on all the circuits were checked to make sure it all timed together OK - the uplink at the O2 fed by radio link was only encoded once on the backup satellite encoder at TBW, and the ASI passed over the Thames, and the feeds on the Adelphi link to SMH was also an ASI onpass of the Richmond Terrace hoist camera- not that a shot of the Big Ben face being delayed by an extra frame would be noticed of course.

There were high power radio mics on Big Ben and on the Wembley Stadium roof to hear the fireworks there.

The entire Wembley set up was only on air for about 30 seconds, and none of the 13 radio cameras and 6 cabled cameras (plus the two helicopter cameras had they flown) obviously would have been on air for much time at all.
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