France’s Biggest Summer Festival Produced Live with Blackmagic Design

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Blackmagic Design today announced that a full ATEM live production workflow was used during the French music festival Vieilles Charrues to support on stage performances from internationally renowned artists such as the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Elton John and The Black Keys.

Live production specialist Sombrero & Co, who managed all aspect of video production across the festival’s two main stages, used a centralized production hub featuring multiple ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4Ks and a Compact Videohub router for signal distribution.

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Camera feeds from both stages are taken via optical fiber to ATEM Studio Converters, where they are converted to SDI and fed into the production switchers, via the 40x40 router. The ATEM Studio Converter also provides full talkback and tally, so the director and vision mixer can talk directly to the camera operators on both stages and collaborate to manage the live production of content.

“Video production at major festivals such as Vieilles Charrues is a difficult balance, because as well as capturing all of the individual bands’ performances, the festivals themselves have their own style and spirit, so you have to be able to produce content that is in keeping with that, as well as ensuring the hundreds of thousands in the crowd all have a fantastic experience,” explains Julien Brunet, Sombrero & Co.

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The live program mix of performances and wide angle crowd shots, as well as commercials and sponsor messages during performance breaks, is then fed back to the router and is screened on two large scale LED screens at the side of each stage.

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“When devising the workflow for the control room, we decided on a dual switcher workflow because it gave us more flexibility,” explains Brunet. “Many of the larger international acts will come with their own creative directors, who want to check the footage matches their wider vision for the artists. The additional inputs and Multi View monitoring features offered by the ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K gives us the flexibility to do that, as well as providing video content for the big screens to keep the crowd entertained.”

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“We know that we can trust equipment from Blackmagic Design to not only withstand the rigors and demands of an outdoor festival environment, but also to provide us with the professional broadcast quality features that make it possible for us to produce compelling content that enhance the spirit of a festival,” concludes Brunet. “The production hub was designed to be collaborative so that our camera operators, the festival director, live artists and technicians can all understand what we are trying to achieve on every single performance, and the Blackmagic Design workflow enables us to achieve that perfectly.”