Lime Pictures shoot with Hamlet.

28/03/2013

Lime Pictures prides itself on being a creative repertory company with imaginative ideas, that embraces new technology and techniques. It's success is based upon reality, children's and youth drama. Lime Pictures has produced some of the most popular programs, one, namely Hollyoaks, which remains at the heart of British youth culture. Popular for its drama story telling, music, fashion and trends. With all its production facilities in house, program quality is kept to the highest standards.

At Lime Pictures we utilises mobile shooting units., with at least 4 shoots every day and sometimes as many as 8, operating in both 1080 and 30p high definition to get the particular look and feel they are famous for, and having technical monitoring which is familiar and easy to use for its Directors of Photography and technical operations staff is of utmost importance.

Directors of Photography/D.O.P. (Lighting Cameramen) manipulate the illumination of the scene to produce the desired look within technical specification and scheduling constraints. Their responsibilities include producing the required image on set and location by using light, color and any other technical means; checking monitor line up and adjusting as necessary, also adjusting paint flare, knee controls and details when necessary. All of which can conspire to produce out of specification vision levels, if just a video monitor were used. So precision equipment is an absolute requirement.

Camera operators and are not only responsible for operating the video camera and associated equipment e.g. steadicam on set and location they need to be creatively aware of the impact created by the angle of particular shots and also technical quality which is provided by our roll on roll off mobile shooting units that have vision control monitors as well as test monitoring, enabling feedback to be provided as needed.

Each mobile shooting unit is equipped with LCDScope high definition monitoring capability, except for one that required upgrading from its vintage LCDScope 400WVA SD unit. garnered his experience at such pinnacles of the TV establishment as the BBC and Granada Television, wanted to facilitate the continuation of operational and technical monitoring capability and chose the latest LCD Scope HDWVA to replace it.

The Hamlet LCDScope HDWVA monitoring instrument is packaged in a small form factor 3U high half rack width enclosure, providing backward compatibility from composite, component, RGB through SD SDI to HD SDI. It's easy on the eye monochrome LCD with white traces and displays ensuring there is no distraction from the job in hand. Audio monitoring is included as standard with bar graphs and lissajous displays of analogue, AES/EBU and embedded audio inputs. A de-embedder makes life easier for listening to the sound if required. The in-built battery pack further enhances its capacity for mobile operations.

We'd had on-going good experience of Hamlet's LCDScopes, and the operational staff and DoP's have confidence and familiarity with them, so the HDWVA provided us with a direct replacement and upgrade path that suited us best. We find that the LCDScope displays are perfect for the job, even when the shoot requires getting into awkward situations.

Tony Quinn, Technical Supervisor for six years at Lime Pictures, Liverpool, England