Brooklyn Quarter streams Comic-Con panels with Blackmagic

The ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO mixer, Studio Camera 6K Pro cameras and other Blackmagic solutions enable Los Angeles-based creative cooperative Brooklyn Quarter to stream events like San Diego Comic-Con or shoot multi-camera productions like the Novel Chronicles YouTube series.

Brooklyn Quarter is a storytelling cooperative and production company that creates unique web series, films and podcasts co-founded by Timothy Reese and Danielle Beckmann. In order to broadcast live over the Internet and capture events for later post production, the company has adopted a workflow comprised of an ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO mixer and three Blackmagic Studio Camera 6K Pro units, along with other Blackmagic products: an ATEM SDI Extreme ISO device, ATEM Studio Converter processors, a HyperDeck Studio HD Plus recorder, and an Ultimatte 12 HD compositor. When it comes to on-location coverage for streaming, Brooklyn Quarter has developed the Penelope-02 system, consisting of an ATEM SDI Extreme ISO mixer, ATEM Studio Converter devices, Blackmagic Studio 6K Pro cameras and a HyperDeck Studio HD Plus recorder.

Timothy Reese believes that adopting this workflow with Blackmagic equipment has brought them many advantages: “Last year we did panels at WonderCon and San Diego Comic-Con, and we recorded both to post on YouTube. Recording at a convention can be a tricky thing because you need something that sets up very quickly and breaks down just as fast. This year, the added 6K resolution on the Studio Camera 6K Pros made framing and punching in a breeze. Large rooms can make camera placement very daunting when you’re in a time crunch, but we didn’t have to worry about the distance.”

ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO in Brooklyn Quarter

One of the main features of the ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO mixer for Brooklyn Quarter is the ability to individually record all connected signals. This allows the production company to edit live events and record all sources as individual files and timecode, plus a master copy of the program. A DaVinci Resolve project file is also saved linked to those of the isolated sources, so that the images are combined into a timeline that can be opened with a single click. It drives the multicam shoots for Novel Chronicles and all of our project builds. We use all 8 inputs for cameras, and change the configuration based on whether we’re recording episodes or DIY tutorials”,Reese notes.

Previously, with other cameras, Brooklyn Quarter would transmit viewing information via the HDMI or SDI outputs to multiple capture cards in a computer, and then had to check very quickly that they were all still recording to SD cards after two or three sessions. The change has been very noticeable in his day-to-day work, says Beckmann: “Novel Chronicles is complicated to edit. But now after a shoot, an editor can open the DaVinci Resolve Project file and trim the timeline from the ISO inputs. The turnaround is in a fraction of the usual time. It’s glorious.”

Audio signals in Brooklyn Quarter

One of the main problems the new products have solved for Brooklyn Quarter is the “nightmarish audio explosion of different hardware and cables.” Thanks to Fairlight tools, the ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO model provides the ability to perform complex audio mixing. It has enough channels to process all SDI sources, plus additional channels for XLR, RCA and MADI signals.

“Because we run eight cameras and five microphones for every Novel Chronicles episode, the amount of cable runs increases logarithmically. If we are not careful, there will be cables everywhere. Literally, everywhere! A great feature of the HD8 ISO is the MADI input, allowing us to radically simplify our audio setup. We historically used a separate PC, soundcard, and ADAT to record the microphones in ISO within Reaper. Now with the ATEM Microphone Converters, we can connect all of the microphones into the ATEM with a single cable for built in sync,” Reese explained.