CETS go to Mars

Stars on Mars is a new television show starring 12 adventurous celebrities competing to conquer Mars in a hyper-realistic environment, hosted by Star Trek alumni and the oldest person to ever fly in space, William Shatner. 

CETS was commissioned to provide the broadcast and media capture technology behind the entire production: from operators and technicians to camera systems and the data management of all shoot material. Technical Supervisor, Jon Dobson, said, “Stars on Mars was quite the challenge, having to provide our technology in extreme conditions was always going to require some very special solutions from the CETS team”.

Solutions on the fly 

Major projects in the field of broadcasts require careful planning and testing prior to deployment on-site. Stars On Mars – Series 1 was a great example of meticulous planning, down to the finest of detail. Yet with all the planning, a show like this inevitably throws up a curveball or two which requires some solutions to be developed on-site, as it happens.

The Stars on Mars producers had a mammoth job of delivering a new format in a challenging environment. The CETS team rose to the challenge, providing innovative solutions on the fly; integrating remote location shoots back to the ‘Mars’ base using low bandwidth satellite internet links to help deliver the Mars experience.

Integral providers of the technology behind Stars On Mars

A large production such as this leant itself to the latest in technology enabling the acquisition of crisp high-quality images to help feature the natural environment of the Coober Pedy site. We opted for 24x Sony FR7 PTZ remote cameras to work into our overall solution. The FR7 offers features such as a 4K Full frame sensor supporting video acquisition up to UHD @ 120P. The camera system also has integrated Real-time Eye Auto Focus and tracking, integrated electronic ND filtering, plus many more features.

Jon added, “Not many companies can offer the level of integration that CETS was able to bring to the table. Our full reality production kit also included 16 of our trusted Panasonic UE150 PTZ and UE100 remote cameras, 14 auxiliary cameras, our Commander Remote Camera Control Environment, a Micron Broadcast Routing universe and Skaarhoj Control panels. The new cameras played a huge role in our solution which was built from the ground up based on innovative thinking and solid industry experience.”

CETS’ contribution didn’t stop there. Integrating with the  IT Network both on-site and remotely, we provided state-of-the-art Gallery facilities for the team of Directors, Producers and multiple technicians required to run a show with this level of coverage. CETS provided approximately 1.5 Petabytes (PB) of storage for the stream media and off-rig camera card data. 

Extraordinary creativity in extreme conditions

Not something out of the textbook, delivering a project of this scale meant that the creative and technical teams needed to work together very closely in the most challenging of locations. Creating a flawless workflow and solving problems on the run in a fast-paced environment such as Stars on Mars is only made possible by our expertise in the industry delivering high-quality content from capture through to post-production, and the effort our experienced crew always puts into any challenge that they’re presented with.

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