LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND -- Lime Pictures was created out of the rebranding of Mersey Television in the mid 2000s. Working for transatlantic principles, producing popular television for world markets is our primary brief.
Lime Pictures prides itself on being a creative repertory company with imaginative ideas that embraces new technology and techniques. Lime Pictures has produced some very popular programs. One, “Hollyoaks,” remains at the heart of British youth culture. With all its production facilities in house, program quality is kept to the highest standards.
Lime Pictures utilises mobile shooting units. We have at least four shoots every day and sometimes as many as eight, operating in both 25p and 30p 1080 HD to get particular looks. Having technical monitoring that is familiar and easy to use for our Directors of Photography and technical operations staff is of utmost importance.
Each mobile unit had been equipped with Hamlet LCDScope HD monitoring capability, except for one that required upgrading from a vintage LCDScope 400WVA SD unit. We chose the latest LCD Scope HDWVA for that upgrade.
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. The easy-on- the-eyes monochrome LCD with white traces and displays ensures 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 with Hamlet’s LCDScopes, and our operational staff and DOPs have confidence and familiarity with them, so the HDWVA provided us with a direct replacement and upgrade path that suited us well. We find that the LCDScope displays are perfect for the job, even when the shoot requires getting into awkward situations.
Tony Quinn is Technical Supervisor at Lime Pictures, who has also worked for the BBC and Granada Television.
