Panasonic technology closely follows the lives of the contestants in 'Big Brother 15'

The compact multipurpose cameras and the new Panasonic AV-HS6000 mixer allow the viewer to take what is collected by the 72 cameras that follow the lives of the contestants of the popular reality show minute by minute.

With a share of 22.4% and 2,438,000 viewers, Telecinco premiered the fifteenth edition of Big Brother. The longest-running reality show on television and a true pioneer of the audiovisual medium continues fifteen years later as alive as that September 16, 1999 when Spaniards attended Endemol's adaptation of the Dutch format for the first time.

He Big Brother Dutch had been released just seven months earlier, so the production company commissioned by Telecinco for its production in Spain, Zeppelin TV, was forced to design an entire workflow and technological developments that would allow its 24/7 broadcast for the first time in the world.

An omnipresent element in all editions is the house of Big Brother, a space in which the 16 contestants coexist under the watchful eye of 72 cameras.

Unlike other editions, in GH 15 The entire action takes place in a single house, instead of two, with a completely different layout than those we have seen so far.

The technology of Panasonic During these fifteen years it has played a prominent role in capturing everything that happens in the house. Its multipurpose cameras go almost unnoticed by the contestants, thus achieving an immersive effect for the viewer in the day-to-day life of the house.

José Luis Gacal, technical director of Zeppelin TV (Endemol Group), has commented to Panorama Audiovisual that one of the imprints that Zeppelin TV has marked in the history of Big Brother is "from the point of view of technology, the adoption of emerging solutions such as disk servers, which we were the first to use. Along with greater storage capacity, we have made great progress in these years in design and operation, with higher performance equipment both in robotic cameras and in matrices or mixers... we have always tried to be on the crest of the technical wave."

Artisanal beginnings

When Zeppelin TV began producing this format, the technical team was forced to develop its own tools capable of responding to a production with such a huge number of cameras operating 24/7. Zeppelin worked hand in hand with other companies in the sector such as Crosspoint, Vitelsa or Panasonic in these first developments that would soon attract the attention of production companies around the world that adopted this R&D to face the challenge of putting Big Brother on the air in its different versions.

Gacal acknowledges that "at the beginning it was all very artisanal since there was no equipment or software that allowed us to do what we wanted and thanks to our technological commitment to the format we equipped ourselves with tools that have later been used in a multitude of reality shows around the world."

From the Spanish experience, solutions emerged such as CamPan, a computer remote control system for Panasonic multipurpose cameras, allowing us to overcome the typical barriers of control systems, such as distance, the maximum number of cameras and the number of control stations. The CamPan system was, without a doubt, a precursor to everything that would come years later in relation to control under IP environments.

"In contrast to IP, CamPan allows us when selecting a camera to 'link' that information with its corresponding matrix to be able to make signal routers, monitoring... the integration of IP with matrices would represent a significant investment, so we continue working with a system that 100% satisfies our needs."

Much of the action that takes place in the house of Big Brother It is captured using the Panasonic AW-HE100 and AW-HE50 multipurpose compact cameras, although, as Gacal admits, “we are already planning to renew and introduce the Panasonic AW-HE 60, which allows for infrared optical telemetry to be integrated into the same body.”

Multi-camera production

In terms of implementation, all implementations can access all cameras. In this edition, eight complete programs are produced, so any of them can access any camera at any time. All of this material is hosted on Harris Nexio servers (Imagine). To date they had been using a Snell Kahuna mixer, but for this edition Zeppelin TV has opted for the new Panasonic AV-HS6000 mixer for high-level productions, thus completing the selection of shots by matrix cutting in each of the programs.

"At the integration level it allows us to directly create a multi-screen, have two effects mixes and two keys... which gives us more flexibility. We are very happy with the result. It is very robust, we have already had it tested 24/7 continuously and we have never had to reset it," Gacal acknowledges.

The AV-HS6000 mixer is the first 2ME model in Panasonic's HS mixer range. The intuitive layout of its buttons and its 10.1-inch touch panel, which in addition to displaying the menu also allows for multi-screen output, are of great help in broadcasts as complex as the case of Big Brother. Its main unit has 32 SDI inputs and 2 DVI inputs, in addition to 16 SDI outputs, while four DVEs per ME bank allow multiple transitions in creative productions that require high-paced work. The mixer offers four independently configurable multi-screen outputs, with a maximum of 16 windows per channel. It also has non-volatile memory to store video clips, which can be optionally expanded to hold 81 clips of 30 seconds each.

24 hours and app

Big Brother is the only program in Spain capable of generating content itself for the creation of a 24/7 channel that broadcasts live signals from the Big Brother house throughout the day. The signal of this channel is available on MiTele.es.

One of the new features this year is that second screen applications allow viewers to interact and make decisions that can decisively affect the development of GH 15.