The recent Isle of Wight festival was the first major music event in the UK to be broadcast live in 3-D. The three-day event took place on June 10-12, with headline performances from Kings of Leon, Foo Fighters and Kasabian. A critical component of the system was a tracking pedestal, the Skquattro.
This helped overcome a major challenge in manipulating the much heavier 3-D rigs around the stage areas, according to Telegenic, which broadcast the event on behalf of Sky 3D. Telegenic decided to use the Skquattro pedestals, initially developed by rental specialist The Camera Store (TCS), part of the Vitec Group, for filming at the UK’s Royal National Theatre in London. TCS took the elevator section of the Quattro pedestal and mounted it in a specially-built tracking skid, which allowed the bottom of the column to sit between the tracks. The result was a pedestal retaining the unique 1m height elevation of the Quattro, which could move smoothly along tracks.
For the Isle of Wight festival, the Telegenic coverage involved five Skquattro pedestals. Two were on a 30m track immediately in front of the main stage, with a third on a platform 35m back into the audience, on a 10m track. For the second stage, there were two cameras on Skquattro pedestals on a 15m track.
