Holy Ghost Festival of Life Deploys URSA Broadcast during Live Production

Blackmagic Design today announced that a multicamera live production workflow, featuring the URSA Broadcast and URSA Mini Pro G2, was employed during the Holy Ghost Festival of Life (FOL) and used to acquire content for big screen projection and live streaming.
Held at London’s ExCel, the 30,000 seater FOL event is one of Europe’s largest gatherings of Christians, which saw people come together for a night of fellowship, praise and prayers.
Hungry Earth Productions utilized its four Blackmagic URSA Broadcast for acquisition, but needed another two cameras to meet the event’s specifications. “The URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2 was available as a rental option and I was intrigued by the fact it was a hybrid camera with all the familiar onboard broadcast controls,” begins Jerry Curd, director and producer at Hungry Earth.
“My initial concept was to use the URSA Mini G2’s shallow depth of field to complement the URSA Broadcasts’ coverage, and that theory certainly paid off. The match was indistinguishable, and due to the identical operational controls and Blackmagic’s SDI protocol for camera control, we were able to rack all of the cameras using the same hardware.”
A Pocket Cinema Camera 4K was also added to the mix as the sixth camera. “We had never previously contemplated using this camera,” explains Curd. “But its weight and form factor made us think it could be ideal on a stabilizer or handheld on stage. We use a Cosmo wireless system and Hollyland range extender on our usual roving stage camera, so we took the Pocket camera’s HDMI output into that.”
To assist with consistency in saturation across the camera setup, Nick Warren, the team’s colorist and DIT, designed a 3D LUT for each camera in DaVinci Resolve using Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curves.
Prayers, fellowship and praise lasted all through the night and were livestreamed to thousands more viewers across the world. FOL’s in-house team handled the live broadcast, utilizing an SDI audio embedded feed from Hungry Earth Productions, alongside a Blackmagic Web Presenter and mimolive software.
Big screen coverage was supplied by SFL Group who handled all of the venue’s AV and projection. “Our team used an ATEM Television Studio Pro 4K for the vision mix, then SFL took the 1080p50 feed over 3G-SDI, plus six computers that had hymn lyrics, VT playout, a clock timer for speakers, and various other graphics, for projection and relaying on screens around the venue,” Curd explains.
“We’ve worked on this event for many years now, starting back in 2001 with a couple of SD cameras, when the crowd was a fraction of the size,” he concludes. “Since then our production capabilities have grown and evolved in line with the festival. Blackmagic Design has and will continue to play an important role in the production systems we deploy.”