Two Orchestras at Westminster Central Hall: The Marvels of Saudi

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Saudi National Orchestra chose Spiritland Productions to capture and broadcast their dual concert – The Marvels of Saudi — live from London’s Westminster Central Hall.

This concert saw the two orchestras played together for the first time, with full music and video capture, end-to-end production management and technical facilities provided by Spiritland Productions.

Spritland ONE looked after the music, taking over 250 channels, mostly individual mic bugs or RF heartsets, from stage via MADI to be mixed for live broadcast on our SSL System T 500 by our Senior Music Sound Supervisor and Co-Founding Director, Antony Shaw. Each channel, including the 12 strong audience FX Schoeps, was recorded in triplicate across our two DAD powered Reaper Multitracks and Joeco Dante routable recorders. 

For vision and production, our Project Manager Andy Wood and Technical Manager Tom Ross worked with producers and senior Saudi Orchestra managers to ascertain the technical requirements of the show and of Director Kamil Tanios. 

Our production team liaised in detail with venue heads of departments as well Westminster City Council to obtain all the necessary parking dispensation and structure license for cable bridges and management — something that can sometimes be overlooked.

The end result was 9x Sony HDC-F550s with a mixture of PL mount Fujinon and Canon Cinematic glass, 4x Sony FR7 PTZs and 1x DJI Ronin 4D for the music concert capture and five Sony HDC-3500vs with B4 broadcast lenses for separate pre-show studio presentation area and 2x reporter contribution positions. The music camera grip was comprehensive with a large jib on a tracking dolly, a Furio on the downstage edge, an autopod column in amounts the orchestra, a wireless handheld camera and 3 pedestals around the room to provide dynamic shots. 

Additional audio and visual RF coverage was installed in the venue by our engineers, at the last minute, allowing presenters to deliver reports to camera from many key VIP reception rooms, arrivals halls and main concert room. 

We also delivered 80 Riedel Bolero comms and panels to the event that were used for both TV production and event show calling production. Run across two 1024 frames and an RTS Odin the Dante network was used to its full potential to deliver the main 4Ws required to keep everyone involved in the production talking. 

All 13 cameras dedicated to the music concert were ISO recorded at 2160p50 in the truck, with a variety of clean and dirty PGM records and format conversions to deliver the UHD clean PGM as well as the dirty 1080i50 live TV broadcast via Satellite Uplink Vehicle. 

To deliver the mammoth 19 camera live show, complete with two autocue locations, Arabic lower third graphics server and two channels of EVS, Spritland worked with our partners ProLink Television and their single expander UHD OB truck. This unique partnership meant that an extremely high audio channel count, as well as a very large camera channel and vision input count could be achieved in smaller trucks in a part of London where space is at a premium. 

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