Hotel Room TV Studio Is Suite Success for Young Hollywood
By Jim Bask
The Dream Machine
And that’s why, when it came time to equip their studio in the sky, Young Hollywood chose NewTek’s TriCaster to power their Four Seasons studio. “Our TriCaster allows us to operate at the broadcast level, to do everything the broadcast outlets can do,” Moras says.
“TriCaster is my dream machine,” Cohen tells me. “By creating a device that’s professional quality and affordable, NewTek has allowed us to get top-quality results with a feature set that’s unbounded.” High praise from an Emmy-award winning editor and veteran of network, prime time broadcast television, with decades of experience working in the industry.
“I came up through the ranks of broadcast television, where it cost a half-million dollars just to put an edit station together,” Cohen says. “Back then, just like today, most hardware manufacturers followed the rule of “one equipment item, one function.” The brilliant deduction of NewTek was consolidating the efforts of a production studio with all the feature sets you need, into one box. With TriCaster, you have the ability to have prerecorded materials roll in, three-dimensional logos spinning, a full audio board, title generation, virtual reality sets, and Chroma key, and it’s all been reduced to one small, affordable unit that emulates a full-sized broadcast facility.”
The TriCaster in the Bathroom
Even if Young Hollywood had decided to plunk down the millions necessary to equip their studio with “one item, one function” broadcast gear, the strategy would have been a dismal failure all for one simple reason; space.
When your studio is housed in a converted hotel suite, where do you locate your control room? For Young Hollywood, the answer was simple, in the bathroom.
In place of a vanity and sink Young Hollywood has installed a TriCaster 460 running Advanced Edition software. Try fitting one of those full-sized video switchers into that tight space!
While Young Hollywood often uses their TriCaster to live stream interviews, they also use the TriCaster’s record functions to record four separate feeds of every segment they produce from their studio. Isolated feeds are recorded from each of the three studio cameras, as well as a produced program feed coming from the output of the TriCaster. This allows the production team to easily fix any technical or content problems with their already-produced program segments. Back in the bad old days, before TriCaster, Young Hollywood would produce many of their pieces by syncing up to three iso camera feeds from individual cameras and editing them together, shot-by-shot, in post-production. Making the jump to TriCaster has allowed the production crew to cut the four-hour task of post-producing an interview or studio performance segment into a half hour or less. This enables Young Hollywood to push out a huge amount of content every day in an effort to satisfy their viewer base’s ravenous appetite for the latest digital celebrity content. And it all comes out of a bathroom. And just as a side note, the TriCaster takes up so little space in the hotel suite’s converted bathroom, that there was room to convert the hotel room’s tub and shower into an audio voiceover booth.