The kitchen studio
UK - The Fish Society has been running for 25 years and is one of the UK’s leading online fishmongers. Having witnessed the online spike of a home cooking being filmed for YouTube and TikTok during the pandemic, the company decided to branch out and build a studio kitchen within their Guildford-based offices to deliver their own ‘how-to’ video content.
“The team wanted a premium system with cameras used for recording and streaming live content and after going through various options, we mapped out a solution that was right for them,” recalls Flipside AV managing director, James Cooper. “When they mentioned Master Chef as their inspiration, I had a felling there would be a technical challenge that can often happen in a separated studio kitchen, but I think we mapped it out just right with the camera and mic positioning to get some good footage – it’s a proper broadcast set up after all.”
“The main objective for me was to for the space to feel authentic at so that when viewers watched, they felt comfortable – like they could easily achieve this recipe at home,” says Amy Birse, marketing content manager at The Fish Society.
The kitchen studio has been installed with three BirdDog P200 PTZ cameras, with two placed to the left and right facing the kitchen, and one directly above the cooking station for an aerial view of chopping and prepping. Along with two sub-miniature wireless Audio-Technica 892 headset microphones to be attached to the chef on screen, two Audio-Technica shot gun mics have been placed on equal sides of the kitchen along with a large diaphragm XY microphone.
“The XY covers the general background noise,” mentions Cooper, “but the two Shot Guns are focussed on the cooker and grill, to capture that crisp sound from the grill and the chopping board counter area so that you have just enough audio in the mix to be able to fiddle around with it a bit so it’s not just dry close mic sounds. It’s not an echoey room so you can fiddle about and try and get it to sound as natural as possible.”
Flipside also installed a PC based rig for live streaming and recording mixed output. “They can record the mixed output, but they can also record the continuous feeds from the cameras if they wanted to do more post editing for a more polished video,” adds Cooper. “This ultimately had to be computer-based rather than any sort of hardware video mixer to have total control. The joystick controller from BirdDog, for example, means they have some pre-set recall and movement on the cameras on a separate unit.”

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