3D storytelling conference

On 22nd and 23rd of March, a conference was being held to celebrate the new innovations in 3D technology. This was hosted by our university with some of the tutors being responsible for the event as a whole.

My role was once again Head of Lines, as this was another opportunity for me to practice on a large scale event ready for Rave 2012 at the end of the year.

Lines wasn't easy for this event, there were a few complicated lines run that we had to sort out to try and make look as neat as possible.
There was a camera on the Mezzanine Floor, which doesn't have a wallbox for any connectivity. This meant I had to get inventive and run a cable from the welcome space on the bottom floor, along the floor, up the wall, up the side to the mezz, and into the area that the camera was positioned. I was aided by my 3 lines assistants which meant that the line was in place within 15 minutes.

I had to allocate long coax cable for the run from room 209/210 wallbox to the 3 cameras that were in room 212. This was a vast distance and after testing all the cables beforehand, one still broke during the install. To solve this, I decided just to run a new cable and keep the broken one there, but labelled. We made sure the new cable was working fine before running it. After the cameras were set up and connected, we couldn't get a picture from them on the assigns on our vision mixer. We had patched the signal from the wallbox to CAR straight into the assigns. We figured out that we had hit the digital cliff, and solved the problem by using 3 repeaters to extend the range of our signal.

We we asked to produce a picture of TX on level 1, where there was an overflow space. We decided to run a cable from the wallbox to our connection boxes for the projectors, and convert the HD/SDI signal to one that the projector would work with. However after testing, we discovered the BNC connectors in the wallbox we planned to use weren't working and couldn't be fixed. We had to scramble round to find connectivity in one of the edit suite rooms on level 1, and take a connection from there by over patching it in CAR. we could then run a cable to the projector from there. This took a lot longer than planned, and pretty much tied up the whole evening we had planned for other things.

The other cameras used were ones looking over floors 4 and 0 from high up. These were a simple install, and we had no problems patching the signal in CAR.

NEXT: What I have learnt from the 3D conference for use in Rave2012