Posted: 08 August 2018 at 7:52pm | IP Logged | 8
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I'm in my 23rd year as a freelance video engineer working in conferences and events (Before that I worked in a video facility in the civil service so I've been in video for 35 years in total). I do a lot of projection, screen-switching, VT playback, cameraman, a bit of racks (vision engineer for multi-camera jobs) and the odd bit of vision-mixing. I can find myself putting a single telly on a stand in a hotel conference room or rigging dozens of projectors in a stadium.
I'm currently in the middle of an eight-week stint in Jakarta as a projectionist for the Asian Games. We've rigged 78 projectors for the opening ceremony and will be keeping 42 of them for the closing which will involve a completely new set-up. This is my third major sports event in three years - Rio Olympics in 2016, Islamic Solidarity Games in Azerbaijan 2017 and now the Asian Games. This picture of me in Rio (a screen grab from a Panasonic promotional video) shows the kind of set-up all three jobs have had:
I do awards shows (particularly BAFTA and the Royal Television Society) and lots of IT and technology-based events. I still do a bit of music now and then - most recently as a cameraman on the Country 2 Country festival in London. In the past I've done tours for acts as diverse as Girls Aloud, James Taylor, Mary J Blige and N-Dubz! One year I found myself at Earls Court on a Friday night doing camera on Iron Maiden and on the Saturday I was at Wembley Arena with thousands of little kids doing CBeebies Live!
I don't tend to do much sport but have worked on two Ryder Cups (2010 and 2014) and the World Rowing Cup. At the London Olympics in 2012 I was on the shooting at the Royal Artillery barracks.
Here's a couple of videos of jobs I particularly enjoyed: IDEX is a big defence exhibition and conference which I've done twice in Abu Dhabi. The video shows the opening of the 2013 show. While my fellow cameramen were running round the arena trying not to get run over by tanks, I was on the pool deck on the 19th floor of the Hyatt Hotel next door! Apart from a few high-angle shots of the arena I was mainly there to get the various aircraft doing their pretend bombing runs down the waterway next to the venue.
The second video is at Battersea Power Station and we had to rig 18 projectors - three on each chimney and four on each of three bottom sections. The content was split into five sections in a D3 media server and sent to the five sets of projectors and the D3 wizard then did all the warping and blending to bring it all together. Sometimes we do it in the projectors, sometimes it's done in the server.
Sorry for waffling on so much but I wanted to get across the variety of what I do which is one of the main attractions for me.
Edited by Robbie Moubert on 08 August 2018 at 7:52pm
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