This year's HDTV broadcast of the Academy Awards was aired live on ABC from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, in the 720p HD format. The remote production went extremely well.
NEP Supershooters provided mobile production facilities for this year's 79th Academy Awards telecast, which aired on Sunday, Feb. 25. The pristine high-definition images were broadcast around the world with Grass Valley HD equipment.
NEP Supershooters operated three of its all-digital HD mobile units, Silver and Gold, on-site for the main awards presentation telecast. The company's SS25 production truck was also employed to cover celebrities arriving as part of ABC's preshow red-carpet coverage.
More than 20 Grass Valley LDK 6000 mk II WorldCam HD cameras were used throughout the Kodak Theatre in connection with Silver and Gold mobile units, along with two Grass Valley Kalypso switchers — one handling the 16:9 HD broadcast and the other handling the 4:3 SD show for analog viewers.
Both trucks employed several Grass Valley PVS 2000 HD Profile XP Media Platform servers, Grass Valley SMS7000 and Concerto Series routers, as well as a full complement of Grass Valley Kameleon signal processing and conversion modules. NEP Supershooters' SS25 used a dozen LDK 6000 WorldCam cameras, a Kalypso HD switcher and the new GeckoFlex HD signal processing system.
For the live stage show inside the Kodak Theatre, video server company ProQue operated four Grass Valley PVS 2000 HD Profile servers and a mix of five PDR 200 and PDR 300 MPEG SD servers. All servers were controlled by ProQue's Prodisk proprietary system. The servers provided random access playback for the show's pretaped segments, commercials and billboard packages, as well as the dozens of film clips that were shown on-screen during the telecast.
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