The Voice UK uses Blackbird to power massive production workflow efficiencies

Posted: 10/09/2019

Running since 2012, The Voice UK is an enormously popular British television talent show that searches for the next big singing star. The show features artists drawn from public auditions who battle it out each series to win a £100,000 cash prize and recording deal. Over the years, the show’s judges have included music royalty such as Sir Tom Jones, Kylie Minogue, Boy George and Rita Ora.

The show producers, Wall to Wall, needed to work with a 17 camera multi-cam setup with 8 audio tracks from each HD camera source. The standard Avid workflow only supported up to 9 cameras and using low-budget computers with core i3 processors, the logging team needed to remotely log all camera feeds simultaneously with the option for rough cutting.

With an urgent need to make the production workflow much more efficient, Wall to Wall and its post house, ENVY, turned to cloud video editing platform, Blackbird.

“Blackbird enables easy access to each artist’s timelines, including notes which greatly helps the edit.”

Jai Cave
Technical Operations Director
Envy Post Production

Blackbird enables the on-site Wall to Wall production crew to send MXF camera proxies to a watch folder in Avid storage. Once there, the proxies are ingested into the Blackbird cloud- native platform at ENVY’s studios. Blackbird’s interface enables all 17 camera feeds to be synched together in individual play windows which allow loggers to start, stop and log each video with customisable keyboard shortcuts. Producers can easily search through the logged timelines of previous footage to create structured edits for each artist’s journey. Metadata is linked back to Avid for the finished edit by conforming the full resolution media.

Blackbird has completely transformed the production workflow of The Voice UK – dramatically reducing the time taken to organise footage and produce the finished shows as well as enabling loggers to log media 17 times faster.

“With so much footage to organise, The Voice UK has vastly benefited from Blackbird’s accessibility and flexibility.”

Helena Ely
Head of Production
Wall to Wall

ENVY is a member of the Blackbird Productions Partnership Program. This program collaborates with post-production facilitates to provide Blackbird to TV programme creators globally.