When NHS South Central needed to reach the widest possible audience with their Fluoridation Debates they called on Focus to broadcast them for them.  They had to be seen in their entirety without editing out a single second.

You can now view the debates on the NHS South Central website.

Want to know how we did it?  We used three Sony 500 series camcorders, two operated by camera operators Andy and Bob, the third camera was locked off at the back. Like all professional cameras each camcorder produces frame accurate timecode, so to ensure they were all synchronised and to prove we didn’t miss a single work they were all locked to the same time-of-day timecode.  At the back of the room our Datavision vision mixer was supplied with SDI feeds from all three cameras, whilst at the same time we recorded all three video streams on the camcorders for back-up.

The vision mixer was operated by our director, Ian, who switched the cameras and directed the camera operators over talkback.

All too often sound can become the poor relation on a job because nobody wants to pay for a sound operator.  That makes no sense at all because in most cases audio is even more important than the pictures, and that’s certainly true on this occasion.  Colin, the sound guy, mixed the audio from the chairman and four experts, as well as from two radio microphones which were given to the members of the audience who wanted to speak.  That audio went to the PA system as well as to our recorders.  The director checked the audio and video feeds which were recorded to DVCAM and DVD recorders.  That’s in addition to the back-ups on each camera.

The Chairman of all the debates was Peter White, who hosts BBC Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ as well as being the BBC’s Disability Correspondent.  Because he is visually impaired we provided him with a radio ear-piece fed from a radio microphone through which he was kept abreast of the next person in the audience to ask a question.    He handled it all amazingly well of course.  The debates were occasionally fiery, with passionate speakers on both sides.  It actually made very entertaining television – although that wasn’t the main point!

After the debates all the equipment was packed up and taken back to the studio.  It had taken four hours to rig and check, making sure all the cables were safely fixed down and not going to trip up members of the audience.  Four hours to rig but only a little more than one hour to take down and pack into the vehicles.

Back at the studio we encoded the finished programme in four half-hour clips to widescreen .wmv files with an optimised data rate using Adobe Premier and Canopus Procoder.  To prove that not one second was lost from the debates the actual time of the recording was displayed on the screen, together with the client’s logo.  It’s always nice to know the client is proud enough of our work to associate with it!

But do we want Fluoride in our water?  That’s a very good question!