Christmas means but one thing to many broadcasters now: it's the time when their most profitable franchises — the Saturday night light entertainment behemoths — conclude their runs.
This year, the BBC's semi-celebrity dancing show, Strictly Come Dancing, seems to have beaten the previously all-conquering X-Factor on the UK's other mainstream free-to-air broadcaster, ITV, in the ratings war. And while the latter hired Wembley Arena to stage its final, the BBC show has been using the enormous George Lucas Stage at Elstree Studios on the outskirts of London for its entire run.
The show has been supported by BBC Studios and Post Production in what has amounted to a 24/7 operation during the series' thirteen weeks. Recorded in front of an audience of over 700 — which in UK terms is usually about as big as it gets — it takes full advantage of BBC Studios and Post Production's recently installed production gallery suites at the George Lucas Stages and some impressive tapeless connectivity.
Indeed, Strictly represents an interesting insight into current tapeless workflows. Around 80 to 100 hours of material each week is captured right up to the live Saturday night show on multiple camera formats and at various locations. This year's show no longer makes use of offline to online workflows either, and now sees multiple HD recordings simply ingested and backed up to Object Matrix nearline storage and LTO. Feeds are then passed through a MAM system and logged.
Clips from interviews and daily highlights are sent to Avid Media Composer, while producers clip additional material using the logging system in one of the edit suites before they send it to Avid. As everything transferred to Media Composer is in HD, no conforming is needed.
Content for the main BBC1 show is sent directly from BBC S&PP's Soho base to the EVS in the studio in Elstree using Avid's send-to-playback function. "Having a data connection between the studios has been crucial," says post production supervisor, John Loughman. "But while this is a common feature used to transfer material, not many people do it over a distance of 15 miles."
More info on BBC Studios & Post Production here: www.bbcstudiosandpostproduction.com