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Bexel Provides Rental Gear for ‘The Glass House’
8/14/2012
BURBANK,
CALIF.: Bexel supplied custom equipment package for ABC’s new
interactive real-time reality competition, “The Glass House.” As ABC’s second
in-house produced show, Bexel worked closely with technical consultant Jerry
Kaman and Tim Bock, ABC’s vice president of production for alternative series
and specials, to find solutions that would help meet the demands of the
aggressive, technically advanced 24-hour show.
“The Glass House” features
14 contestants living and competing for a quarter-million dollars in a
state-of-the-art house that is under complete surveillance, with no access to
the outside world. The contestants aren’t just competing with each other, but
also playing the game to win over the audience each week.
Bexel supplied more than 50 cameras for “The Glass House,” including close to
40 robotic cameras, seven fixed cameras and eight large studio cameras and handhelds
for the show. Among these were Panasonic’s new AW-HE120 2.2 mega-pixel robotic cameras. Not only do the Panasonic
robotic cameras provide excellent picture quality, their entire control system
is IP-based.
The production also called for robotic cameras with infrared capabilities. For
those, Bexel turned to Camera Corps’ Q-Ball HD/SD pan-and-tilt camera system,
which incorporates a built-in 10x zoom optical lens and smooth accelerating
pan/tilt motors in a weatherproof aluminum sphere with a diameter of about 4.5 in.
For the project, Bexel also built a custom HD control room with a large fiber
infrastructure and custom workbenches for producers and loggers. A Pesa router
was utilized with a distributed audio routing system, which made the cabling
very easy—requiring the team to simply interconnect everything using fiber.
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