Couch Concerts Live from Le Ferrailleur

Couch Concerts Live from Le Ferrailleur posted: 08/08/2018

For the past eleven years, Le Ferrailleur has been a firm fixture on Nantes' live music scene, bringing fans up close to rock, metal, rap and electronic artists. While the bar can hold a capacity crowd of just under 300 people, the venue's production team has devised a compact live streaming setup to bring an intimate live music experience to living rooms around the globe.

The initial driver behind filming and broadcasting concerts from Le Ferrailleur came from the venue's tenth-anniversary celebrations. We decided to put up a big screen as part of a ten day line up of special concerts - even though none of us had any experience of live broadcasting at the time!, begins Fran ois Montupet. It was a huge challenge, one which took more than a year to plan. We knew we wanted to produce very high-quality coverage of more than 40 live sets, so our system had to not only work within the venue's limited space, but still allow us to make viewers at home feel a part of the audience.

Following the success of the anniversary project, Le Ferrailleur has expanded the concept: Concerts canap :' (Couch Concerts). Director Mathieu Amussat-LH tellier was responsible for designing the system and knew from the outset that a multi-camera system comprising six Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera 4K would fit the team's requirements. The image quality that we can achieve with such a compact camera is astonishing, and its size means we can place the units wherever we need them in the venue, depending on the act that is playing and how they interact with the crowd.

Mathieu explains that the camera's 4/3 mount allows the team to work with a range of good quality lenses to ensure every element of the concert is captured in stunning detail. As with all intimate live venues, low lighting is something we have to plan for; however the cameras have performed well in a range of setups. Before each show, we speak with the band's lighting director to make sure there is adequate lighting at the front of the stage to make sure the detail and image quality of the performance is retained when live streaming.

Using an ATEM Television Studio HD to mix the camera signals, the team produces a live program mix of concerts, which are broadcast via Le Ferrailleur's social media channels. The ATEM switcher is super compact, just like the cameras which mean the production setup doesn't disrupt the venue's atmosphere, neither does the audience feel inhibited or watched', continues Mathieu.

We're able to mix sources from 25fps to 50fps, all in full HD. All of the streams are captured on a laptop with an UltraStudio Mini Recorder, which gives us a great archive of content that can be repurposed for highlights packages or mini clips for our social networks.

The Couch Concerts series has already generated great traction with viewers in the hundreds of thousands watching the venue's livestreams, and the team is already planning on expanding its technical systems to support bigger events, such as outdoor concerts.

Whatever our plans, we've found that Blackmagic Design has a solution that will not only fit our needs, but is flexible enough to allow us to expand our live production capabilities, concludes Fran ois. Our system has already allowed us to bring the passion and intensity that the venue is renowned for, out to global viewers, and we already are planning on how we can also help those bands and artists that come to the venue to produce their own video content to help grow their fan bases around the world.

LINK:	https://www.live-production.tv/news/shows/couch-concerts-live-le-ferra...
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