BBAU 2025 house in Dreamworld Exhibition Centre

[dasnico]

I feel like most of the control room will be remote if it’s only hot head cameras being used, it significantly eases their on-site operations.

There may be a small amount of staff on site to action things immediately and provide ongoing maintenance for production but it would not surprise me if the show was being edited out of Sydney with footage being stored on the cloud.

Mm. Unlikely. That’s a significant amount of data for a 24/7 show with many audio and HD video feeds, let alone comms feeds. The production facilities will be at dreamworld again. Don’t forget the Banijay job postings for Queensland for big brother. It also adds a lot of risk if their [insanely fast] internet connection drops. Even with the fastest internet, control commands to the cameras would feature a significant delay over the World Wide Web.

 

[andrewpatrick_]

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Reallyyyyy not a fan of no roof

 

[BB12]

I feel like most of the control room will be remote if it’s only hot head cameras being used, it significantly eases their on-site operations.

There may be a small amount of staff on site to action things immediately and provide ongoing maintenance for production but it would not surprise me if the show was being edited out of Sydney with footage being stored on the cloud.

I would imagine it would be a full crew on site.

Big Brother is back in Queensland | Screen Queensland

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM NETWORK 10 Image: Host Mel Tracina at the Gold Coast’s Dreamworld, the home of Big Brother (courtesy Network 10) A brand-new house, back where it all began. Direct from the diary…

screenqueensland.com.au

Jacqui Feeney, Screen Queensland CEO, said: “Endemol Shine Australia’s Big Brother has been an important training ground for many local screen practitioners and this new iteration will employ 95 crew as well as supporting four paid attachment positions.

 

[Matty492]

Anyone know what these are used for?
would make sense for them use the full space (if not already used for something else). Block the street off at the top and use the space for control rooms, production offices, dressing rooms, storage for tasks, etc.
Nice and close to the house, Stage and car park.

 

[kamui]

Mm. Unlikely. That’s a significant amount of data for a 24/7 show with many audio and HD video feeds, let alone comms feeds.

I don't doubt the production facilities being at Dreamworld. Unlike the behind-the-mirror stuff, I think the host in the control room is a defining look for Big Brother Australia. I totally expect to see Mel in the actual control room.

But generally speaking, remote editing is not out of the question. When Endemol rolled out a new production system based on the Microsoft Azure cloud a couple of years ago, they touted how controlling and editing can now be done completely remotely. So the technology would be there and it absolutely makes sense as well to have at least some of the work done remotely..

I would also expect Endemol to edit the shows remotely, especially based on comments like these:

I would imagine it would be a full crew on site.

Big Brother is back in Queensland | Screen Queensland

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM NETWORK 10 Image: Host Mel Tracina at the Gold Coast’s Dreamworld, the home of Big Brother (courtesy Network 10) A brand-new house, back where it all began. Direct from the diary…

screenqueensland.com.au

Jacqui Feeney, Screen Queensland CEO, said: “Endemol Shine Australia’s Big Brother has been an important training ground for many local screen practitioners and this new iteration will employ 95 crew as well as supporting four paid attachment positions.

Less than 100 people working on the show is not a lot. There are usually way more people involved. They've employed more than 300 people during the final season on Nine.

I'd take this as indication that there won't be much editing and post production done at Dreamworld.

 

[dasnico]

True but I have no doubt that production is significantly scaled back from what it used to be. I’m sure some stuff is being handled remotely but I’m positive the thick of production will be handled on site if only due to the sheer quantity of footage alone.

 

[kamui]

True but I have no doubt that production is significantly scaled back from what it used to be

I'm not so sure about that...

I've just went back and tried to count all the names that were listed in the credits for this year's Celebrity Big Brother in Germany, which runs for 17 days* and included every single person that worked on the show in some capacity. I've counted 388 names and did not count the names listed as "With thanks to", which would have taken the number over 400.

It also doesn't include third party for catering or security (because those were only companies listed), but it does include a few people who were credited for being CEO of the production company or the TV channel. Some of them were involved in construction of the set and probably didn't work for the show for its full run. But I don't think I can exclude so many positions that the number would actually be below 100.

And for comparison: I also tried and count the names listed on ITV's version. There are around 200 people listed in the credits of one of the daily shows. I haven't compared the names to other daily shows and don't know if it they just list all editors etc. that worked on this specific episode or on the daily in general. But the 200 does not include people working on Late & Live or the eviction shows as it doesn't list AJ, Will or any styling crew etc.

And I have not counted the names for those shows, but sources say 350 people working on Australian Survivor and Julia Morris claimed 500 people working on I'm a Celebrity. So I really can't see Big Brother do it with less than 100. Otherwise, they might want to sell their knowledge on how to do that to TV execs around the world that would then likely overpay for their versions.

(* you could probably make it 20 days, if you include the influencer web edition that run for 3 days shortly afterwards and probably used some members of the same team)

I’m positive the thick of production will be handled on site if only due to the sheer quantity of footage alone.

There are lots of shows that handle the whole "film there, edit it somewhere else later" just fine. You log things and you use AI to help you track things down. It's not that complicated. And it's really not that hard to access data in the cloud. It's not even that much of a ridiculous amount of data saved. I know from several other versions in Europe and North America that they don't record the footage from all cameras but just a few... and then they use separate, somewhat pre-selected recordings to put the show together and only go back to the "full" archive if necessary.

While I haven't read anything in that regards about the Australian production, I highly doubt that they'll do it completely differently from their European and American counterparts.

 

[dasnico]

No, it’s not completely out of the question for some remote work to happen. Many reality shows shoot and air after the fact. These types of live shows require post production to start while footage is coming in live to allow for a <24hr turnaround. Big Brother is typically following two stories at any time and there’s a story producer for each one who creates notes and flags content for editing. No, all cameras are not recording. The recording follows the two stories being followed. There is a shader/PTZ operator for each story. A vision mixer decides which specific cameras will be recorded. It would be a massive undertaking to have 20, 30, 40 cameras routed remotely back to a control room, say in Sydney.

Again, just from my experience in reality tv, including the one I’m sitting in the control room of right now, the footage is monitored, captured and produced on site. We have two control rooms to accommodate this team. This particular show isn’t “live” so they send hard drives back each morning to be ingested to their editing software and rough cuts are typically available in about one week. At no point is anything access via the cloud, at least at this point. The only time the cloud is ever a thing is for remote editors and story producers while in post production - something the live BB format has an extremely minimal amount of time for.

Imo, BB is too fast paced for such remote work to even be feasible. I cannot attest to how many crew members will actually be working on this reboot so we’re only assuming at this point how many crew will be on it. The comment on ~90 local crew being hired probably isn’t accounting for people being flown in or departments that would otherwise be a second thought to most.

But hey, as long as the show gets made.

 

[kamui]

It would be a massive undertaking to have 20, 30, 40 cameras routed remotely back to a control room, say in Sydney.

Just to be clear: I don't expect the control room to be in Sydney. I fully expect that to be at Dreamworld, where it will eventually be used as a set in some way or another.

But anything picked up in the control room is what I expect will be uploaded to the cloud and then edited from wherever.