Mtime.com brings Hollywood to China
Published: ASIA
CHINA: With China becoming the second largest film market in the world, the country’s biggest film web portal and promotional company mtime.com was chosen to organise promotional events for a number of recent Hollywood blockbusters. With many of Hollywood’s biggest actors unable to attend in person due their busy schedules, mtime.com, with some help from Blackmagic Design, was able to design a simple A/V solution to bring them into the action.
To draw the maximum attendance, mtime.com is often required by its clients to hold an event consisting of many fan meetings taking place simultaneously in multiple cities. Yang Mian, senior system engineer of operations and maintenance at mtime.com and his engineering team were therefore tasked with designing a multi-cam live production and broadcast system to make this a reality.
After initial consultation with the largest Chinese broadcasters, it was expected that the team would need to deploy a separate OB van for each venue, resulting in significant project costs. Mr Mian instead designed an IT style live interactive video streaming solution built around Blackmagic Design equipment and Skype.
‘At The Amazing Spider Man 2 event, stars of the film including Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and Jamie Foxx, appeared alongside director Webb and producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, all of whom were based at the main venue in Beijing and needed to interact with fans on site and in theatres across eight cities,’ explained Mr Mian.
At the heart of the live interactive video streaming solution is a collection ‘live stations’, each of which consists of a laptop computer with Skype running on it, a Blackmagic Design UltraStudio SDI video capture device (connected via USB 3.0) and a Mini Convertor HDMI to SDI connected via HDMI.
A total of eight live stations were set up at the main venue in Beijing with an additional one live station deployed at each of the satellite venues. Each live station in Beijing corresponded to a live station in one of the eight cities and took care of sending and receiving A/V feeds between themselves. With this solution, all the eight live stations in Beijing sent the video feeds from the other eight locations to the on-site switcher, where the technical director was able to output any video feed for the audience’s viewing.
Additionally, each live station was equipped with Blackmagic’s Intensity Shuttle capture and playback device that could be used as a backup for the UltraStudio SDI and also if needed to capture and analogue feed.
‘Blackmagic Design’s products are very easy to understand and use,’ explained Mr Mian. ‘For example, the Mini Converter has all its inputs on one side and all the outputs on the other side. This lets you quickly finish all connections in the busiest work environment.
‘Simplicity is important to us. Most people building the streaming system for the venues in other eight cities were not video engineers and some of them were even just movie projectionists,’ he concluded. ‘We only had three days to build the system up and I could only instruct them remotely from Beijing. I wouldn’t have been surprised even if the systems in two venues had crashed. However, everything went incredibly well.’