MTV Europe Music Awards: behind the scenes

MTV Europe Music Awards: behind the scenes posted: 08/12/2017

by Ger de Gram

The show at the MTV Europe Music Awards (EMA) may well be the biggest music and video extravaganza in Europe. United is in charge of recording this unique event, which this year was broadcast in both HD and UHD. Time to go behind the scenes at the awards show in the SSE Arena, London.

Cheering. So much cheering. Eminem just received an award on an extraordinary, gigantic podium, and the fans are going crazy. Backstage, ten or so United staff members look on approvingly. It's going well. Really well. Apart from one discussion about the sound being a little bit too loud, this massive recording project is going smoothly.

The MTV Europe Music Awards were first held in 1994, when (pop) stars and bands such as Mariah Carey, Bryan Adams and Take That swept the field. In terms of set-up, it was all a lot smaller then than it is now, a kind of side dish to the main course that was the American MTV awards show.

How things change: the EMA has become one of the biggest music events in the world, attracting millions of viewers and being broadcast in practically every Western country where pop music has a prominent place in popular culture.

This is the fifth time United has organised the recording and, as with every previous edition, technological innovation is a big part of the production. This time it's 4K (also known as Ultra-HD or UHD) that's leading the way. This higher image resolution is not new in TV land, but what is new is broadcasting live at this level of clarity. Although broadcasters in Germany and the UK are experimenting extensively with this technology, its coverage is nowhere near universal, and bringing an Ultra-HD feed live to viewers' screens is a very different matter from regular broadcasting.

A big reason for that difference is that the EMA is not a single broadcast event. On the contrary: there is a backstage programme, a red-carpet show and the actual live presentation of the awards, all of which is interspersed with all kinds of film clips, snippets and interviews. And we haven't even got to all the feeds for social media yet: little bits and bytes, snippets for platforms such as Snapchat and Twitter.

The heart of the operation

To make all this content available, United has installed a central hub: think of the postproduction van as the lynchpin of the show. This technical heart is full of Macbooks, monitors and other equipment to make sure the recording goes smoothly. An essential part of the project is a (really) tiny box in the middle of the van: the server. The heart of the operation. This is where all the content comes in, explains Wouter van Heuningen, who devised the server infrastructure. Everything is assembled from here. The box also functions as a kind of post box: it sends all potential content to the various vans and editing suites. No one needs to carry around a USB stick or SD card to get hold of images.

And that's for the best, because if you think anyone could run from the recording location to the editing booth in under three minutes, you've got another think coming. The EMA set-up is so huge that you pass production spaces and vans in all kinds of areas around the SSE Wembley Arena in London, the location of this year's action. It's for good reason that some United staff members have had their bicycles flown over to the UK as a way to avoid having to walk so far. To give you an idea: there's a good kilometre between the editing suites and the production van.

A super-fast 10GB fibre optic connection ensures that all (4K) content is available everywhere, all the time, says Rens Dijkshoorn, United's technical manager. We've built a special 4K infrastructure to account for the huge amounts of data that come with Ultra-HD.

As early as the beginning of October, well before the show on 12 November, the team was already considering the whole technical side of the project. A sizeable task, according to Dijkshoorn. It's a combined show, with both 4K and HD. That's pretty complex. You have to plan it really carefully.

An unwitting viewer of the programme on Sky - the British broadcaster that will show the Ultra-HD version of the event - will have no idea of the complexity of this 4K live recording. That viewer will mainly notice how sharp the image of presenter and British singer Rita Ora is when she appears, as if by magic, from the set. But take a look backstage, and the sheer quantity of cables, computers, systems, displays and feeds says it all.

In the end, what we really want is to identify exactly what the client wants, says Bolke Burnaby-Lautier, who has the final responsibility for the EMA at United, and who can be seen as the ultimate spider in the web. Then I just start building; the different sections at the venue have to fit together like Lego blocks.

Map

Burnaby-Lautier shows the venue on a kind of map, including all the cables, production vans, camera locations and equipment. The finished product is impressive. But: We've done a lot of live shows like this, with lots of cameras and different locations. That's a piece of cake for us - we're good at it. But that's HD. It's no simple matter to turn that into 4K.

Not to mention that many different kinds of cameras will be used today, from traditional, user-friendly broadcast cameras to more cinematographically sophisticated film cameras such as the Sony F-55, to give the show a more luxurious look. A hotchpotch, says Yke Erkens, an expert in film cameras, with a smile. The art is to combine the user-friendliness you get from broadcast with the look of film.

To make sure the 4K goes smoothly, in addition to a traditional HD set-up United has also installed an extra mainframe, located outside the production van. This m

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