MARILLION LIVE : Guinness World Record attempt, from roll to record to DVD in 42 hours.

Marillion! This normally prompts some distant memory of a lead singer called 'Fish' and an impromptu verse from their 1980's hit, Kayleigh. Well, Fish left the band 15 years ago and they're still making music with a 'new' lead singer. In fact, they're still going strong and have a large and dedicated following around the world.

The reason I'm giving you this snippet of rock history is because about six months ago a South African production company called THE boom boom BOYS, which consists of Paul Rowlston (Writer/Director) and Jayce (Editor/Director/Cameraman), contacted Visuals about a Guinness World Record breaking project they were involved with. It required recording Marillion live and producing a saleable DVD of the show within the space of a weekend - something which to our best knowledge had never even been attempted before anywhere in the world! Our experience of working with THE boom boom BOYS at this point in time extended as far as they had hired some camera equipment from us about 12 months prior to this, after being recommended to us by our South African office.

     

At first, although very interested, we were slightly sceptical. After speaking at length with THE boom boom BOYS, by phone and by e-mail we soon learned the bigger picture and could see that it was a very achievable project. The idea was well thought out and all those involved to make this a success were on board and excited about taking part.

     

The band would be on stage for about 70 minutes finishing about 22:30. The DVD duplicating company based in South Wales opened at 7 am and it was about a two hour drive to their premises. This gave us about six hours to produce the all important DLT, (digital linear tape), which is used by the duplicators to make a glass master. The DLT's contain an exact layout of the disk and the data integrity is very secure. Our intention was to live encode the output of the PPU to reduce the time it would take to produce the DLT. If it could possibly be avoided we did not want to have to spend time digitizing from tape after the show had ended. As most people know even the smallest technical problems can consume time very quickly. The show went like clock work, without a single hitch and the DLT was produced and ready for delivery by 01:30. Beer flowed in celebration and the DLT was dispatched. The first DVD was sold at 4pm on Sunday and the quality surpassed all expectations. The total time of production from the point of pressing record on the encoder, was about 42 hours. All relevant paper work, photo's and video footage has now been sent to Guinness world records and the band hope to have their application verified within the next 4 to 6 weeks. The total sale of the DVD's on Sunday amounted to 1600 and it is still obtainable from the Marillion website.

     

Visual Impact's role was to supply a multi camera system which would support up to 8 cameras. Four would be EFP and four would be mini-cams. For just over two years we have had a small PPU utilizing Sony DXC dockable camera system. Currently we use the DXC-D35WSP, a widescreen camera. The camera adaptor used was the Sony's TX7 range of triax adaptors, with their associated CCU's and RCP's. The camera's are fully controllable and are used extensively for filming rock and pop concerts by a number of different companies. The mini-cams we used would be Sony's DSR-PD150P a 3-CCD DVCAM camcorder which is able to provide a 16:9 anamorphic Image, allowing us to cut between these and the main cameras. The mini-cams were mounted on stage providing close up footage and obscure angles of the band members. We ran composite video from the mini-cams back to Sony's DFS-700 vision mixer. We used the vision mixers composite input option board, which facilitates the unit to accept up to 4 asynchronies composite or s-video sources. The main cameras provided a SDI feed to the vision mixer. In addition to the camera requirements, the output of the PPU needed to be NTSC, for international compatibility. We had to standards convert the output of the PPU. We felt at Visuals that the standard four field four line converters which we had readily available, were not the right tool for this application. I contacted Bob Wright of  Video International and after explaining the project he was only to happy to lend a hand and supply a Video International's AV Bridge, with horizontal and vertical motion vector compensation. The unit would receive an SDI video signal, delay and embed the audio program mix into the SDI stream and output this to a NTSC DIGI Beta and to a Digital Rapids multi-format encoder, operated by Peter Kavanagh of Digital Rapids. This was then locally networked to Ray Shullman of Isonic's computer, where the DVD menus were added and the DLT was produced.

     

Says Paul Rowlston, of THE boom boom BOYS, "We've grown used to working pretty much on our own at the end of a VERY LONG supply chain. But with this project it soon became clear that we'd benefit from some kind of technical support. We didn't know just how much we'd benefit until we arrived at the gig and found that Steve Gould (of Visuals) had already unloaded the gear and was ready to 'rock n' roll'! The fact is, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we may not have even been able to complete this project without the fantastic work done by Visual Impact's hire team - and we certainly wouldn't have a product of the quality we have without the equipment, commitment and support of our friends at Visuals".

The project has been accepted as a complete success bar the results of Guinness World Records which we hope is just a formality.

Visuals Group Technical Department.