I don't know why this place is suddenly filled up with Who news, but it is. This one's here, not because it's Who news, but because it's my past coming back to haunt me (hence the lack of Tennant picture, I'm afraid).
Prepare to be bored.
Anyway, according to Broadcast via Outpost Gallifrey, production on the next series of Doctor Who has gone tapeless thanks to investment by BBC Wales in a Unity.
Oh the unmitigated horror. Back circa 1999 and 2000, talking about this kind of thing was my job – I was technology editor of Televisual. Trudging around Soho, talking to every post-production house under the sun about what new kit they'd just bought: doesn't sound brilliant, but they paid me; they'd send me to Las Vegas and Amsterdam every year for the big conferences and I got to find out about all the new programmes before they happened. Sounds a lot cooler now, doesn't it? Sigh.
Back to the topic in hand, though. Back then, Unity was just being introduced and virtually all the big post houses already had at least one. Tapeless workflow? Jeez. It's amazing six years on that a flagship BBC programme would be done on anything except a tapeless workflow system. Still, that's the regions for you. Backward, backward, backward.
Oh dear. My wife's coming to kill me for that. She's from Swansea, you know. Just like Russell T Davies.
There's no link there that I know of.
UPDATE: This blog entry is hereby renamed “The too much red wine blog entry”.
March 18, 2006 | Reply
Hee... I have to say that the idea of filming going tapeless isn't even news to me, though your perspective on the matter is amusing... and don't be too hard on yourself. Red wine posts are definitely the way to go!
March 18, 2006 | Reply
To quote the immortal words of Sharon Stone in Total Recall, "Now you've done it!"...
It's not the actual filming that's gone tapeless, only the post production. Acquisition is still going to be on Digibeta or potentially a high def tape format (although that might change, since BBC Wales has already experimented with Sony hard disk cameras).
What a Unity does is allow you to digitise everything centrally (rather than digitised in whichever editing suite you happen to be in and have a tape for) then chuck all those great big files around between your editing suites before eventually being played out from MPEG2 transmission servers, rather than chucked out to tape, passed along, redigitised then transmitted.
To be fair, in a, erm, more sober light, BBC Wales is ahead of most of the BBC in this (although better centralisation of resources is a help there). Compared to the private sector, where someone like Molinare has had Unities, studios, post and TX in the same building (just off Carnaby Street in fact) for years, they're still a bit backward though. But that's the Beeb for you: vast amounts of kit, but not really very "joined up".
I am, quite literally, the dullest man alive.
March 18, 2006 | Reply
Dullest? Really not possible...