BBC Post launches at the Birmingham Mailbox

BBC Post Production, Birmingham, is set to complete its move from Pebble Mill and launch its new facility in the Mailbox complex on September 6 2004.
Set in a contemporary space in the heart of Birmingham City Centre, the new facility will house a range of modern, fully equipped and inter-connected editing, dubbing and finishing suites, all linked to a central high speed Unity server
BBC Birmingham is home to some of the best dramas and magazine programming on television - from ‘Doctors’ and ‘Grease Monkeys’ through to ‘Countryfile’, ‘Houses Behaving Badly’ and ‘Gardeners World’, and was earmarked as one of the key BBC sites that could be integrated more closely in to the community.
The new BBC Mailbox office complex, which sits amongst the trendy bars and restaurants in the centre of the city, has been designed to be more welcoming to the general public with access to viewing areas such as ‘The Archers’ and Radio West Midlands. BBC Post Production has begun to move with its customers to the Mailbox and will be completely up and running by the time all of its clients have migrated at the end of Autumn 2004.
BBC Post Production’s facility will house 12 editing suites, all of which are on-line capable and are built around the Avid Media Composer and Adrenaline system. All 12 suites and separate digitising station will be linked by the Avid Unity storage system, which enables flexible and efficient sharing of material and media.
All suites are equipped to work at broadcast resolution and the on-line Avid suites come with a choice of digital videotape machines and in the future will be capable of supporting High Definition. All have sound mixing facilities and digital video effects as standard.
In addition, there are two finishing suites and two dubbing theatres including one with 5.1 capability. There is a choice of compression resolutions and widescreen monitoring comes as standard. The finishing suites are also equipped with a digi-beta and DV machines.
Birmingham's dubbing theatres plays host to high-end dramas like 'Mersey Beat' and 'Dalziel & Pascoe' as well as on-going documentary series like 'Top Gear' and 'Country File'. The premier dubbing theatre features the Solid State Logic Avant with full Dolby Surround, including capability for 5.1. Its primary function is to cater for the highest quality audio mixing demanded by drama customers who wish to work outside London.
The new Avant is a feature film style desk. It has 24 channels, but there are also four layers. This enables two dubbing editors to working on a programme at the same time. One editor can prepare up to 24 inputs of dialogue and ADR for mixing down to four stereo pairs, while the other does the same with up to 24 effects tracks. In addition, Instead of recording those premixes, all the moves and levels are memorised by the desk - they are 'virtual' premixes.
The other theatre is built around a Soundtracs DS00 digital desk. Both dubbing theatres have track-laying facilities and can record commentary to picture. Both run Pyramix for easy movement of an audio project from vision edit to dub. The track-laying areas have automated Pyramix editors and can handle inputs from all audio formats.
Clive Hodge, Head of Operations, BBC Post Production, said: “The Mailbox is one of the most modern, efficient and technologically advanced facilities in Europe from which we are able to offer a full range of services to both our BBC and independent programme makers. Its positioning at the heart of the city places us amongst our customers and audiences.”
(GB)