Written by Shona Smith on Jun 4, 2020. Posted in General Interest

Producer Yoshiteru Haruta talks about his first experience using Remote Filming on set in Tokyo

The international spot shot in Tokyo was Yoshiteru Haruta’s first experience of using remote technology to conduct a shoot for clients across the globe. It was also the first time Remote Filming had been used for a full shoot.

In Japan, production is possible again while adhering to guidelines that includes wearing masks and cleaning. “As producer I tried to minimise the amount of people to under 20. It ended up with thirty-five people in the studio”. Watching from across the world were up to twenty people from as far as Spain and Singapore.

Yanina Barry co-founder of Remote Filming monitored the first shoot using the system closely and says “people were coming and going all the time on the system. What was really interesting was that all the crew had it on their phones in the studio. Instead of crowding round the monitor they were all standing around the stage watching it on their phones, so it was useful for socially distancing while on set”.

To set the system up, the onset camera is linked to a laptop with a connection of 4G, Wifi, 5Mbps minimum bandwidth. Ahead of the shoot Remote Filming install the package on the laptop but for those logging in to stream the shoot only a web link and a password are needed.

“There are a few options on the market, some of them more major systems” says Haruta. “The thing that makes me love this system was the fact that you only need to click the link and enter the password. For other systems you need to download the application and install it to watch. I think a lot of clients are unable to do that and it takes a lot of explaining. This system means the agency can just watch it on the phone easily”.

As participants don’t need to download an app on their browser it also means that the stream is secure and that only approved viewers could access the feed via an encrypted peer to peer connection.

It also allows for quick set up. On the day before the shoot setting up the system on the in-studio laptop took about thirty minutes. “The next day, I set up the camera and connected everything but some clients. I could watch it through my computer but some clients couldn’t see, so we called in Remote Filming who were able to fix it in 5-10 minutes. After that there was absolutely no problem. The picture was very clear. We streamed with bit rate: 2500Kbps, with no dropped frames and almost no delay. Everyone was delighted”.

“There were a lot of things I was worried about before the shoot. My biggest concern was network connection. The network and connection was the biggest concern and we had a back-up plan to just connect with zoom but of course the picture would be much lower resolution and we really didn’t want to use that.” says Haruta. In the end the shoot ran for twenty hours without a single blip.

“What we did the last shoot we played back, everyone can see the playback right away. It was so smooth. It is just like another monitor. It was the same as being in video village on the set”.