“Crowded House’s Neil Finn came up with this idea of live streaming the recording of his ‘Out Of Silence’ album over four weeks back in 2016; which he called the ‘Infinity Sessions’. These were a pretty big affair with more than a dozen singers and an orchestra. Since then, the ‘Infinity Sessions’ have just grown and grown, with artists from all over the world taking part. But they were pretty expensive events to put on, with us hiring up to six camera operators, eight or more cameras, gaffers and a grip truck for all of the lighting.”

“As you can imagine, quality is everything at Roundhead Studios, so Neil is always looking to take these ‘live broadcasts’ to the next level. A couple of months back, Neil had this idea of live broadcasting a live session every night for two weeks. Using ‘The Brick Room’ studio, which is a much smaller more intimate space than the one we had used for the previous sessions. So the challenge was to shoot much higher resolution using full frame cameras and cine primes. We used two Blackmagic PYXIS 6K cameras and four Blackmagic Cinema Camera 6Ks, simply because they have the same sensor, latitude and color profile. For switching these cameras and live streaming, we used an ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO that could also create a DaVinci Resolve timeline from the live stream to make my post process much easier. Another game changer to the mix, was adding a Blackmagic Cloud Store Max 24TB for network storage, given we were generating about 2.5TB a night. The 10G Ethernet ports made it super fast matching the 10G port on my Mac Mini.”

“So Neil pulled together this amazing line-up of artists for those two weeks, with the pitch of doing a ‘live stream’ for them on the night. And then after the live broadcast finished, we would pull down the stream and give them a 4K edit of the actual recording. The ISO version of the ATEM Television Studio, along with 6K Blackmagic cameras opened up an entire post editing and color grading workflow making fast delivery a breeze.”