Gearhouse Broadcast’s HD flyaway facilities will be positioned on the show’s permanent set in New South Wales, Australia. It will provide a large production gallery, MCR and CCU areas, a VTR/EVS room and two audio control rooms as well as a comms area. A team of engineers from Gearhouse Broadcast’s Projects and Equipment Rental division will be on hand to set up the facilities. They will also provide on-site support once the series begins on 18 November 2013.
The 21-day, all-HD production requires 30 Sony HDC1500 cameras with a further 90 remote controlled cameras including, 26 Hitachi DK-H32’s, 16 Q-Ball robotic pan/tilt/zoom heads, 20 HD-MiniZooms with infra-red night illumination, 30 MiniShots and three Toshiba IKH-R1’s. The remote controlled pan/tilt/zoom equipment has been supplied to Gearhouse Broadcast by speciality camera systems supplier Camera Corps.
Two Sony MVS 8000 vision mixers will cut the cameras, with one creating eight video streams recorded on two EVS XT3 machines and eight Sony XDCam recorders, and the other used for the live UK transmission. The production will again use a Pro-bel Cygnus 288 x 288 HD/SDI video router.
With the celebrity contestants on the reality game show split into rival camps to begin with, two Yamaha audio desks are required for mixing, while the live shows for ITV1 and ITV2 will use a Calrec Omega audio desk. A comprehensive Radio Microphone Receiver system will capture everything that is said within the set, including the two camps, studio and the trials areas. An Optocore system is then used to send the audio back to the production gallery over fibre, allowing access to all of the audio on the desks.