Artistic Licence in Manchester Studios upgrade
- Details
The studios have been undergoing massive refurbishment since 2016. The Granada Studios were built in 1954 for the purpose of recorded and live filming, and served as the Granada/ITV headquarters until 2013.
As part of the refurbishment, Artistic Licence products have been installed in the ongoing upgrade to Studio 1. This is the largest space within the complex, housed within a self-contained building complete with wardrobe, props, dressing rooms and production offices.
A central DMX patch houses two rackLynx octo 8-universe Art-Net gateways and four rackSplit octo 8-way DMX/RDM splitters. These distribute DMX out to eight wall boxes around the studio floor that each house two further rackLynx octo splitters.
The Artistic Licence rackLynx and rackSplit octo products provide compact, high-density conversion and distribution of the Art-Net/DMX/RDM data.
Two Swisson XES-8G Gigabit switches manage the core Ethernet data from production consoles which can then be sent over fibre to studios 8 and 12.
Two Artistic Licence netLynx quad Art-Net gateways were also supplied to provide up to eight further DMX universes either on-set or in the top-rig.
The lighting control network was recently christened by RuPaul’s Dragrace UK which required three studios to be controlled by a single grandMA2, outputting 20 universes of DMX across the site.
In addition to the new DMX infrastructure, nine legacy Strand Lighting LD90 (24 x 10A) dimmers were completely stripped down and refurbished by the in-house team of sparks. The entire system was designed and commissioned by Paul Swansborough, head of production lighting at Manchester Studios.
"The principal reason for choosing Artistic Licence was simple - we wanted a high-quality product that was manufactured and readily available in the UK, post-Brexit,” comments Paul.
