Links Broadcast at Downtown Abbey
Links Broadcast was delighted to be appointed as the OB and uplink provider for ITV’s This Morning, visiting the real life home of Downton Abbey at Highclere Castle.
The popular day-time program hosted by Philip Schofield & Holly Willoughby situated itself on location at Highclere in preparation for the UK release of the Downton Abbey full length feature film.
Links provided the outside broadcast production facilities for the entire show as well as uplink provider and all associated facilities.
Our multi-camera production vehicle, S100, provided the technical hub and this worked in combination with a gallery trailer, housing the production operation. A HD/UHD equipped uplink vehicle, S700, provided the transmission connectivity with the main path being transmitted via Ku band satellite and the reserve path being transmitted via IP using Ka-band capacity and a LU600 LiveU encoder.
A weblink vehicle housed the comms systems for the 5 radio base-stations that supported the crew communications, as well as providing additional internet capacity for the production crew.
The OB rig consisted of cable with 15 SMPTE cable-drops around the house and grounds, 3 multi-core optical fibre systems plus some traditional copper cabling. A total of 7 Sony HDC1500 cameras were utilised, facilitating the rapid relocation of camera equipment & crew and the re-plugging of cable allocations during commercial breaks, enabling the show to move seamlessly from location to location.
Audio distribution was achieved using wireless mics and IEMs fed via multiple antennas situated in the various rooms of the castle and on the lawns, these were delivered to our Studer Vista 1 sound desk in the OB using Studer stage-boxes.
It was wonderful to be involved in such a high-profile live production for ITV and we were really happy that our OB production vehicle, gallery trailer and uplink trucks enabled ITV to produce a perfect live show from such a beautiful location. Links Broadcast’s operations manager, Andy Foster
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