The Collectv designs fast turnaround sports content facility for Whisper

The Collectv designed an agile central creative hub at Whisper’s London HQ in record time to handle the production of high-profile sporting content

London, United Kingdom – 15th June 2022 – The Collectv, the Emmy award-winning broadcast solutions and workflows consultancy, was selected by leading sports and unscripted production company Whisper to design the facilities in the company’s new Broadcast and Production hub, which has been installed on a dedicated floor at the Whisper headquarters in Kew. The solution was installed in an exceedingly tight timeframe of seven weeks from sign-off to the first live edits going through the facility.

The Broadcast and Production hub has been designed primarily to handle the increased volume of content the company is producing following its selection last year as broadcast and digital content production partner by a major sports federation. Both digital and broadcast output is delivered from a wide range of competitions to viewers around the world as part of a multi-year agreement.  

One of the key deliverables of the agreement is a magazine show series, covering fast turnaround highlights of midweek events by a challenging Friday am deadline. To make sure this can be accomplished week in, week out, The Collectv has specced and delivered a high bandwidth, flexible system comprising six dedicated edit suites running Adobe Premiere Pro alongside one audio suite / VO booth, as well as numerous desk pods for the 40-strong production team. Connection is via Cat6a cable throughout, while storage and remote working integration is handled by Editshare. An innovative IP-based talkback system from Unity Intercom allows Whisper staff to join via their computers and devices, as well as accommodating external freelancers who can join via a weblink, enabling the seamless deployment of remote workflows as and when necessary.

As well as the truncated seven week timeframe, the project also faced other significant challenges that included both Covid-19 and the still ongoing supply chain constraints. As a result The Collectv had to innovate in some areas where the supply of certain components was an issue, even to the extent of installing an interim solution when it was discovered the preferred components would be delayed.

“We had to react and move fast many times during the build, and it was vital that we were there on the ground as the walls were going up so we could identify any issues as they arose,” comments Nick Long, Project Manager for The Collectv. “We have worked with Whisper for a number of years, and that enabled us to be pre-emptive regarding their requirements and their preferred workflows, providing SDI matrixes to enable them to display images from any source, whether edit suite, incoming feed, or PowerPoint presentation on their big screens, for instance. We’ve also been able to build in robust hooks to the production networks on the other floors in their building, ensuring that it can lean on capacity in other areas if required.”

Bethan Evans, Director of Production, Whisper said: “We set the Collectv the challenge of installing these new edit facilities, together with the sound and QC suite in a tight time frame. They worked excellently with the construction company and other suppliers to ensure all requirements were covered and to foresee future challenges. With their knowledge of our workflows they were also able to design a system that integrated effectively with our existing infrastructure. The installation has provided us with a great space from which to produce and deliver Whisper’s ambitious and entertaining sport output.“

New faces on board at The Collectv

The UK-based broadcast and workflows consultancy has welcomed two new members to its project and operations teams.

London, United Kingdom – 16th November 2021 – The Collectv, the Emmy award-winning broadcast solutions and workflows consultancy, is pleased to announce two new appointments to its UK team. Both based at the company’s London office, Nick Long joins as Project Manager, and Amy Kellie takes up the role of Operations Assistant.

Nick Long, Project Manager
Working independently in film, TV and video for over twenty years, Nick’s background in Post Production and Finishing has informed his work as a Producer and Technical Lead on projects. Being based at Pinewood Studios for many years has seen Nick immersed in the heart of the industry and given him a chance to produce programming for many UK and international broadcasters and brands – ranging from documentaries, Live multi-camera shows, TV pilots and video content for Broadcasters and online distributors, to independent feature films and short-form narrative films.
A background in Post Production and Broadcast Engineering means that Nick is very adept at designing and implementing workflows, processes and equipment across a range of departments in the broadcast television and film worlds. Nick’s projects have picked up several judge and audience awards internationally.

Amy Kellie, Operations Assistant
Amy joins The Collectv team with a background working across commercials, events and conferences. Having studied Film and TV Production at the University of Greenwich, she gained technical knowledge of production equipment working in a kit room alongside her studies. Since graduating, she has organised commercials for small businesses and coordinated multiple concerts and conferences within the sound-image sector. Eager to develop her skills to execute large scale projects and deliver excellent customer service, Amy is excited to grow her knowledge and skillset with us at The Collectv.

“We’re delighted to be welcoming Nick and Amy to our team. Expanding the crew is a great way to close out a year that’s continued to see increased demand for managed services in the broadcast industry”, says Chris Sarson, MD and co-owner of The Collectv. “We fully expect 2022 to maintain this growth. In order to continue delivering the best solutions for our clients means investing in the right team to help us achieve this and make TV happen.”

The Collectv Continues To Bolster Team With New Hires

London, United Kingdom – 28 July 2021 – The Collectv, the Emmy award-winning broadcast solutions and workflows consultancy, is pleased to announce three new appointments to its UK team. Perrie Codling and Tom Evans join as Media Systems Engineer and Junior Media Systems Engineer respectively, while Patrick Nealon joins as Technical Runner.

The three new hires come at a time that sees The Collectv expanding the business. “The increase in demand for managed services in the broadcast industry has led to a surge in interest for the kind of broadcast solutions and workflows that we provide”, says Chris Sarson, MD and co-owner of The Collectv. “It’s a great time to be growing, innovating, and increasing our capacity with a bigger team that has the right expertise and capabilities. This enables us to continue to deliver our high standard of service.”  

Perrie brings over six years of technical industry experience to The Collectv, having previously been with Director’s Cut and then Timeline Television at BT Sport’s site, where he was frontline support for the Champions League and Premier League. He has a range of skills covering a range of non-linear edit systems, archive solutions, live playout, file-based workflows and IP environments.

Tom has a broad knowledge in post production from a wide range of companies. Since working across a wide variety of edit environments including Clear Cut Pictures and live productions at Viacom, DAZN and BBC, he has gained valuable experience in operating and supporting Avid and EVS systems.

Patrick completed his studies in audio and music production at Buckinghamshire New University and was fortunate enough to have the opportunity, while still studying, to assist on outside broadcasts for Reading FC, Watford FC and the BBC, where he fulfilled various audio roles. He has worked as an audio-visual engineer, and also has experience in a post-production environment, having completed work experience at Pinewood Studios and at Warner Bros. De Lane Lea.

“I have no doubt that Perrie, Tom and Patrick will add immeasurable value to The Collectv team. They embody the spirit and drive that every Collectv team member has to deliver the best solution to our clients.”

The Collectv helps Too Hot to Handle keep cool

For the second season of Netflix’s hit reality dating show, The Collectv was once more in charge of ensuring that multiple terabytes of data made it back safely to post

London, United Kingdom – 23 June 2021 – The Collectv, the Emmy award-winning broadcast solutions and workflows consultancy, is pleased to announce that it played a key content securing role in the production of the Netflix hit reality dating series Too Hot to Handle season two, ensuring that multiple terabytes of data made it back safely to post production in London. Furthermore, it also set up new workflows on site to allow it to stream live content to various production bubbles to ensure Covid-safe workflows while on location.

Produced by Thames and Talkback (Fremantle labels), The Collectv also worked on season one of the show, filmed in Punta Mita, Mexico. This time the location was moved to the Turks & Caicos Islands in the Caribbean, with all cast, crew, and equipment transported to the filming location via charted plane; partly due to the remoteness of the location, partly because of potential transport problems caused by the pandemic.

The difficulties of producing high-profile international content such as Too Hot To Handle led to the decision to shoot seasons two and three concurrently. The individual series have grown in production complexity too, moving from eight streams to 10 streams, and with a second diary room added to allow contestant interviews to take place at the same time. Headline figures from the three-week long season two shoot include:

•   Over 5000 hours of recorded content

•   2928 crew hours on set

•   1770TB of live storage

•   8 crew

•   18 available record channels

“The main difference with this season was undoubtedly Covid,” comments Chris Sarson, MD and co-owner at The Collectv. “Fitting all our people and equipment into a villa for what is effectively a 24/7 operation while keeping everyone Covid-safe with social distancing and frequent testing was a challenge.” 

A new innovation this year saw The Collectv provide live streams from the production for the execs to view what was going on and be able to make filming decisions from remote locations. These were also established in case of any Covid restrictions to provide key members of the team the ability to keep working without having to venture on site.

Extra fibres were run into the villa where The Collectv was established to boost the connectivity up to 1Gb. This was required as The Collectv’s set-up was at the centre of a complex workflow including around 60 remote hothead cameras and a range of cabled end points away from the main villa provided by NEP, which was operating as host on the project. Along with the two fixed cameras in the diary rooms, these were all delivered from the gallery as 10 intercut ISOs to The Collectv, where they were recorded in 10-bit DNxHD185x.

“This makes it the best quality ever seen on a reality show,” says Sarson. “High-end cameras were also used at the cabled points, and for the directed tasks that the contestants undertake, to get that important shallow depth of field look.”

The high-resolution files were stored on near-line storage in two separate locations for security, with LTOs derived off the back of that. Proxy files were transcoded as DNxHD 36 and uploaded to Envy in London for offline. The Collectv team also oversaw sync pulls and sync matches and QC on Avid on-site, ensuring any problems could be fixed while the production was shooting.

Following the successful completion of the shoot at the end of last year, safety copies were brought back to London on different planes while the entire storage chassis was crated back to the UK and installed at Envy for an intensive post production process to begin in order to make today’s on-air date.

“All in all, it was a mammoth task that involved installing a lot of equipment in a remote location and running a high-end production for an entire month, including rehearsals, in baking heat all while the world was in the grip of a pandemic and the situation was changing almost every day,” says Sarson. “Everything needed to work perfectly to make the ambitious on-air date and, with a fantastic team on the ground as well as back in the UK, I’m delighted to say that it did.”

Too Hot To Handle S2 started 23rd June, with final episodes launching 30th June.

The Collectv helps F1: Drive to Survive make The Grid

For the third season of Netflix’s hit F1 documentary, The Collectv was once more in charge of data wrangling at racetracks around the world

London, United Kingdom – 18 March 2021 – The Collectv, is pleased to announce its involvement in the production process of Netflix’s fly-on-the-pitwall F1 documentary series Formula One: Drive to Survive. The third season of the Box to Box Films production, covering the dramatic events of the 2020 Grand Prix calendar, will air on Netflix from March 19, a week before the 2021 F1 season commences at the Bahrain International Circuit in Bahrain.

The Collectv has been involved with Formula One since 2012, providing services to both Sky Sports and Whisper for Channel 4. It has been involved with Formula One: Drive to Survive from the first season and plays a vital role in ensuring all data from Box to Box’s UHD camera crews is safely and securely ingested, backed up, transcoded, and sent on to post production.

Box to Box deploys anywhere between six to nine 4K camera crews at each race, which can generate in turn anywhere between 7TB to 12TB of data between them over the course of the race weekend. The F1 Broadcast Compound shuts down rapidly after the main race has concluded and gets packed away to move onto the next race in a demanding schedule, so The Collectv has built special systems to handle the throughput in the timeframe required and that adhere strictly to Netflix’s backup criteria.  

LTO and near-line storage is used on-site, and one or two types of transport drive, typically G-Technology or Lacie are maintained. Material is transcoded into DNxHD 36 before being sent on drives to The Farm in London for post production (though as the production schedule ramped up towards the end of the 2020 season this was switched to a direct 10GbE connection). 

Taking up two racks in Box to Box’s production area, The Collectv’s system was initially based on rack-mounted Dell 7920 workstations, but has recently been re-engineered around HP Z2s to take advantage of their smaller form factor.

“The Z2s give us the power we need for transcoding the material before the compound is shut down and packed up for the next race,” explains Chris Sarson, MD and co-owner at The Collectv. “They also allow us to transport the equipment in the hold in three large Peli cases rather than having to go cargo all the time, which gives us that much more flexibility when it comes to following the races around the world.” 

Flexibility was a key attribute last year too. The Collectv team was already out in Australia along with the entire rest of the F1 paddock last March for the start of the 2020 season when it was cancelled at the last minute due to the pandemic. And while racing did finally commence for what was Formula One’s 70th season in Austria in July, the 17 races that made up the 2020 calendar were very different from normal and The Collectv had to be extremely responsive to a schedule that evolved as the season developed. 

“Our new equipment means that we can be based at the circuit and we can also be based out of a hotel room if need be, which is an important consideration in this era of biosecure production,” says Sarson. “Also, for the last three races last season we added somebody on via a remote connection. As always, we had a person on the ground who was getting those cards, putting them in the card readers, and copying those onto machines. Then when they went off shift, we could have someone back at base transcoding, copying those files off the drives ready to be delivered to The Farm for post. It’s a big saving both in production costs and in efficiencies and is something we’re looking to do more in the future.” 

While it may have been the shortest for many years, the 2020 F1 season was also one of the most dramatic both on and off the track and featured Lewis Hamilton’s historic seventh world title, maiden wins for Pierre Gasly and Sergio Perez, Sebastian Vettel’s departure from Ferrari, F1’s response to the BLM protests, and much more. 

“People have started to realise over recent years just how crucial back-ups are, and the new media players all have extremely rigorous criteria in place to ensure no data ever gets lost,” says Sarson. “Formula One: Drive to Survive is famous for those candid, offguard moments that provide real insight into the people behind one of the most-watched sports on Earth, and we’re delighted to play our part in ensuring those always make it safely and surely from the camera to the edit.” 

“The Collectv has been an invaluable partner on Formula One: Drive to Survive from Day 1. Their industry leading technical knowledge, coupled with a desire to innovate has ensured they are central to our media management for this series, and several of our other titles” says Tom Rogers, Executive in Charge of Post Production for Box to Box Films. “The 2020 season tested their innovation to the maximum, and The Collectv proved once again why we continue to partner with them. They adapted our media management processes, workflow and infrastructure to ensure we could operate as seamlessly as possible within the parameters of our COVID secure production plan.”  

Formula One: Drive to Survive is released by Netflix on 19 March.