Hotel room edit suite with Matrox MXO2

Crimewatch Roadshow, a BBC production, hit the streets of the UK for a series of live shows in June 2009. From car crime and distraction burglary to shop lifting and arson, they looked at everyday crimes that can affect us all. The show featured CCTV appeals, Wanted Faces, interviews with experts, as well as tips on what to do if you are a victim and how to avoid becoming one in the first place. The show focused on a different region of the UK each week - Greater Manchester, South Wales, Northumbria, and Hampshire. Featured cases included the elderly victims of conmen, the mother of an 18-year-old boy who had his life cut short by a hit-and-run driver, and a vandalism spree that resulted in 90 cars damaged in a single evening.

Editor Tim Hansen spent several days in each location where it was his job to create a 3 ½ minute video transmission for broadcast each day.

"I had my editing system set up in a hotel room and the directors in each city would come back to me in the afternoon with about two hours of DVCAM footage from the day’s shoot. I would ingest then cut the material over the course of the evening then online and dub the same day and output for transmission the next morning."

"I needed to maintain the SD picture and audio quality standards set by the BBC while also having a degree of portability. This project required very fast turnaround and I couldn’t afford downtime. I needed stable solid gear and the MXO2 provided all that."

"I used the Matrox MXO2 with Final Cut Pro 6 to output an SDI signal to my 15' Sony and then daisy chained into a Hamlet waveform monitor/vectorscope. The Hamlet didn’t have an audio card in it so I also had to lug around a set of peak program meters which I ran off the XLRs from the MX02."

"I found the MXO2 to be an absolutely invaluable piece of kit (as well as being very compact and light.) My producer seemed very impressed that I could set up a suite comparable with what they might get at the BBC in about 30 minutes in a hotel room!"