The Royal Wedding

[Jeff Harper]

One only has to watch a football game to understand this is what broadcast companies do regularly, and do best: huge productions. This was nothing short of a military type operation I'm sure. Crews involved hundreds of people who are the best in the world at major events. Billions of people tuned in, so clearly millions were spent in capturing the event. Trucks with crews hidden, sattelite trucks, audio teams, the long shots from a mile away with cameras that probably cost, what? $300K? $500K? I couldn't even begin to guess, that level is so far beyond my experience.

Anyone know what kind of cameras might have been used outdoors? Indoors? I would find it really interesting.

An inside look at the broadcasting of this event would be awesome and an excellent case study.

[Andy Wilkinson]

This does not directly answer your questions but if you look at both the left and right areas of this ultra high definition picture composite (taken just outside Buck Palace) you can see the temporary green structures housing some of the World's TV media etc. You may need to zoom out first to get your bearings. Extreme zooming shows some interesting details in various parts of the picture!

BBC News - Royal wedding: Spot yourself in our hi-def crowd picture

To quote the BBC website: "This high-definition, 1.15-gigapixel picture, is a composite of 189 images. The full picture measures 81,471 pixels by 14,154 pixels. The field of view covers 200 degrees."

[Jeff Harper]

Andy, great link, thanks. Amazing.

[Jim Snow]

I really liked the camera work. Many of the shots were dynamic'; that is the camera was moving. I really like glacier zooms and slow pans and tilts where the motion deaccelerates at the end of the move so slowly that you aren't even sure exactly when the motion stopped. I would love a behind the scenes look at the equipment and methods used for something like this.

[Brian Drysdale]

Originally Posted by Jeff Harper

Anyone know what kind of cameras might have been used outdoors? Indoors? I would find it really interesting.
.

Here's a pretty standard camera on UK outside broadcast units.
http://www.gearhousebroadcast.com/i/ldk6000_ds.pdf

[John Nantz]

I totally agree:

Originally Posted by Jim Snow

I really liked the camera work. Many of the shots were dynamic'; that is the camera was moving. I really like glacier zooms and slow pans and tilts where the motion deaccelerates at the end of the move so slowly that you aren't even sure exactly when the motion stopped. I would love a behind the scenes look at the equipment and methods used for something like this.

Wouldn't it be great if they would make a movie or video about how they did the coverage? This has to be one of the major video coverages of the decade, or more.

Planning - when did they start, what was their organization?
Storyboard - taking the timeline or schedule and putting the storyboard together. Obviously all, or almost all, of the shots were pre-planned.

Audio - how did they do this? What did they do?

Feeds - what did they do, and how?

Editing - totally mind boggling! and on the fly, Live!

Someone could write a book about this and insert a DVD.
Good job for a few PhD students - they could put together a small team to do this in sections.

This coverage was over the top, absolutely Awesome. I told my wife that Hollywood or Disney couldn't have done any better if they had a year to make a movie using a story.

I liked the horse drawn carriages and I think the overcast helped with the colors. The cathedral shots were awesome. There was one clip that featured a tall arch that went to a pointed top and it seged into another shot that also had a similar arch, that was neat. One shot I remembered was of the newlyweds kissing on the balcony and the little girl grimacing and holding her hands over her ears.

Heard an estimate for the wedding at 40 million pounds. I would imagine the media helped to fund a lot of the coverage themselves.

[Wayne Faulkner]

Interesting to find out if you experienced commercial advertising during the Live Broadcast?

Here in the UK, along with the BBC, which does not carry any advertising within the UK, a condition of the UK Commercial TV Companies showing the Royal Wedding was that no advertising at all was to be shown during the event, which cost these companies over £8m in lost advertising revenue during that day.

I'm not sure exactly what arrangement regarding coverage was made between the TV Channels, but I would expect that the BBC, with its Royal Charter, would at least be leading the coverage of the actual event if not providing all of that seen on every channel.

Basically the Royal Family will not allow any commercial activities which use the Crown for financial gain.

So did you see adverts outside the UK on NBC etc?

The BBC DVD is apparently available from Monday...

[Philip Howells]

The most important piece of learning for our clients is that the official photographer, Mario Testino, was only involved in the formals at Buckingham Palace and a guest who's a close friend of the Middletons and a photographer took pictures of the evening party for them not publication. Apart from that the entire recording was a VIDEO - a fact our business should shout about.

No photographer walking backwards down the aisle, no idiocy with the ushers and their hats, no holding hands round the trees in St James' Park - a real 21st century wedding. All the stills photographers as out of sight as the TV cameras - where they should be given the capability of their equipment. Like Chris, I noticed the girl photographer at the Goring Hotel but my guess she was employed by the dress designer.

As others have noted, with the notable exceptions of the pairs of omni sub-miniature mics on the two celebrants (wouldn't the silver versions have been even less conspicuous than black?) and the single one on the Bishop of London who gave the homily and the reader (plus a short stick in front of each) the cameras and mics were well placed to avoid revealing the means of production.. No steadicams or sliders but any number of cobras; genuine fly on the wall production done to perfection. Incidentally, a previous poster commented about no echo - that might have been because, according to one person present in the congregation, there was no PA within the Abbey.

As often happens here the main feed was reportedly from the BBC with additional cameras from ITV and Sky where they could justify them. Interestingly, the newspaper reviews considered that Sky had the best pictures whilst the commentaries were rated as universally awful catering for the X-factor conditioned audience with ITV marginally less awful than the other two.

Overall, let's celebrate this as a wonderful advertisement for our products.

[John Nantz]

Hi Wayne,

Originally Posted by Wayne Faulkner

Interesting to find out if you experienced commercial advertising during the Live Broadcast?

Here in the UK, along with the BBC, which does not carry any advertising within the UK, a condition of the UK Commercial TV Companies showing the Royal Wedding was that no advertising at all was to be shown during the event, which cost these companies over £8m in lost advertising revenue during that day.

So did you see adverts outside the UK on NBC etc?..

To answer your question, we were up somewhere around 2am or 3am Pacific Coast Time (my wife set the alarm clocks and I was too groggy to know anything except the darn lights went on) and we started watching THE Wedding. What I remember were a number of black highly polished cars for quite some time so this was pretty early on. We stayed up until shortly before THE Kiss but couldn't stay away any longer. This had to have been some where near two hours and there was never an advertisement that I can remember.

However, the next day there were some repeats with highlights. Oprah (I think) had a fairly long segment and I don't think there were any advertisements during that period. In the evening there was another program with wedding highlight coverage that did have some commercial breaks, around 8 to 9pm, but I don't remember what channel it was.

The wedding production was absolutely fantastic.

[Brian Drysdale]

This is the OB company who covered the abbey.
NEP Visions - Outside Broadcasting, Staines, UK

Some idea of the size of the operation
TV's royal wedding nerves | Media | The Guardian

I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC or ITV bring out a making of documentary.

[Claire Buckley]

Originally Posted by Brian Drysdale

This is the OB company who covered the abbey.
NEP Visions - Outside Broadcasting, Staines, UK

Some idea of the size of the operation
TV's royal wedding nerves | Media | The Guardian

I wouldn't be surprised if the BBC or ITV bring out a making of documentary.

If indeed that was the case Brian, NEP (North East Productions - Pittsburgh) who came into the UK a few years back by purchasing/merging Visions, were early advocates of Calrec audio consoles in the late 1990s originally purchased for their sports trucks - analogue S2 and Q2. Calrec then went on to dominate the truck business and other broadcast areas in the US.

Why? One principal reason was their 30mm fader pitching which meant you could get many more "analogue or VCA fader channels" across the operational width of the truck. Also a mixer can get a bunch more channels in the finger spread compared to 40mm pitching. And of course, Calrec's reputation for sonic quality and reliabilty in broadcast.

So for the audio interest, it's very likely for the Wedding if NEP were involved they were using the Sigma or Alpha series digital audio consoles (or whatever they are calling the newest spin off). Just a hunch...

:)

[Brian Drysdale]

Yes, you need to squeeze the last millimetre in those units. The scanners (UK term for the OB control truck - it's a term left over from WW2 radar units) are jammed with kit, even with the extending walls.

[Gary Nattrass]

All the visions trucks i have used in the past (scanners, haven't heard that phrase for ages) use calrec console, I was parked next to them two weeks ago at the UEFA champions league match at Spurs but didn't have a chance to spy inside, but as calrec are about the only OB custom desk manufacturer I suspect all the big trucks out there use their desks.

[Brian Drysdale]

Yes, scanner is very BBC, but still used, Visions use the term when describing their trucks. The Beeb have their own language at times, although perhaps less these days. Not sure if they still use the term CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) instead of Chroma Key, I haven't been working in one of their TV studios for years.

[Tom Hardwick]

Originally Posted by Warren Kawamoto

I was amazed with the audio of the Royal wedding! Everything was clear and crisp. I wondered how they got a mic on the bride?

No mic on the bride or groom and the audio level lifts for Kate's responses was clearly audible. I'm pleased to see the BBC face the same problems I do, and use the same corrective techniques.