Fashion Week fashions a TV station

THE SECOND Mercedes Australian Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2004 collection was recently staged at Federation Square in Melbourne. Australian designers presented their ready-to-wear ranges to buyers and the media.

Every parade was filmed and then edited. The finished product was then televised onto ten 42 inch widescreen plasmas and the large Federation Square screen for the general public and guests to watch. This seemingly easy task involved a creative and innovative approach, and technical director, Andrew Ross from Digicast Television Production, the company appointed as the official providers of video coverage at Mercedes Australian Fashion Week, was responsible for making the television production side work.

"We had to film 16 shows over three days using two Sony Digital Betacam cameramen at four different venues.

Each parade was edited and then put into the Sony Network Player which allowed us to create a playlist and play out the content when we wanted to, " Ross said.

"Having worked in a television station before, I've always had this secret desire to run my own television network; something to do with wanting to play with lots of toys, you could say. The Sony Network Player helped me realise this dream as we effectively ran our own fashion week television station from our control room. It allowed us to deliver MPEG-2 videos of every parade, whenever we wanted, and the flexibility to insert sponsors' advertising where they were needed. It made our life so much easier and gave us control of the content," said Ross.

"All of the screens were cabled using the existing cat six network cable at Federation Square. Event organisers and Federation Square staff didn't want us to run lots of cable throughout the building, so we used the existing cable infrastructure".

"We used quite a lot of video distribution amplifiers and video isolators to balance all of the signals because of the different lengths of cable used. For every leg of the journey, we made sure there was a balanced, clean signal. The cable run was over 150 metres and the result was remarkable quality video that was very acceptable for plasmas".

"Initially, we were planning on using the cat six cables as an IP (Internet Protocol) network, but the cable run was too long to run IP. We tried putting in a network switch half way along the cables, but it didn't work. So we chose to use video balans which allowed us to push out composite video across the cat six cables".