Italy’s The Alliance finesses mobile production with latest flight-case solutions

Flight-case solutions were deployed by The Alliance at the Winter Universiadi recently.

Flight-case units FC1-2-3-4 were developed by Italy’s The Alliance for a wealth of mobile production applications. In the last few months, the units have been completely revised and updated in order for them to handle emerging requirements, not least with regard to sports programming.

The origins of The Alliance have been explained in a previous SVG Europe article (https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/leading-italian-ob-service-providers-create-the-alliance/), but in a nutshell the production company derives its strengths from the merger of three well-known companies: Global Production, ONE TV and SBP.

Andrea Gianolli CEO and CTO of ONE TV, comments on the use of the units for coverage of MotoGP: “The Alliance now has four flight-cases units [featuring] fully operational, complete galleries. The unit FC1 usually takes care of creating the filming of the track feed for MotoGP. All the footage we see at home from the tracks are shot from the cameras in each MotoGP circuit, [with] images created for Dorna as a broadcast feed by The Alliance using the FC1.

“Also for the MotoGP, unit FC3 is responsible for the unilateral integration of images required by Sky Italia in the wake of the multi-year production contract. [It also handles] the images taken by radio cameras for interviews with pilots, in-studio when required, and the NLE editing.

“The flight case Unit FC2 creates, again for Dorna, the Superbike feed track, while all the shots on the various race circuits are produced from a complete gallery that is now also an integral part of The Alliance.

“The Unit FC4 is slightly smaller and is calibrated for some studio-based TV productions, but also for sporting events with lower requirements.”

Winter Universiadi

The FC1 2 and 3 units have recently been used for the production of the Winter Universiadi, held in Almaty from January 29 to February 8 2017. As soon as the motoring-related 2016 productions were completed, they were gathered in the hangar of systems integrator Professional Show, and enhanced with new features allowing them to handle the demands of the Universiade.

It was a big production that was realised in three different locations that corresponded to five different venues (places of filming where the races are held). In the village of Alatau, where they carried out the Nordic skiing and biathlon, were two different recording studios with many filmmakers, both managed and controlled by the Technical Unit of the flight case FC1 for a total of 30 cameras employed: Grass Valley LDX80 / 86 with 22 long lenses (72x – 86x – 101x), two LDX86n high-speed cameras, and 36 channels replay.

Also at the resort of Shymbulak were two independent control rooms that were operating simultaneously and were headed by a single technical management. One was dedicated to traditional skiing (giant and super giant slalom), and the other to the disciplines slope style, ski cross, snowboarding and more. Here the cameras used were 26 Grass Valley LDX80 / 86, two LDK 8300 hi-speed ca,eras. and replay with 30 channels.

For the trampoline jumping at Sunkar, the third FC3 flight-case unit was operating, but has still managed a compound with 14 LDX80 cameras, one hi-speed LDK8300, one pole-cam, one jimmy jib, two ice-cams, and 22 channels replay.

So everything in the Winter Universiadi taking place outside of stadiums and arenas was produced by The Alliance using the flight-cases, which as stated have now been improved to provide increased production capacity and accommodate the latest technologies.