The Green Balloon Club is a weekly half-hour nature show comprising a mix of studio and filmed segments for CBeebies. It also has a significant online presence featuring additional video sequences.

At the BBC Children's Village at TV Centre, all content is recorded to a mix of Digibeta or DV tape and ingested onto a central Avid Isis server managed by Avid Interplay. The production staff can view, log and begin to prep and edit sequences. A craft team will finish the edit and export it to Pro Tools for sound dub, from where the programme is outputted to tape for transmission.

Videos from the same raw material are created for the web. The sequences are exported from Avid as Quick Time movies into the Anystream Agility transcode engine. It is then produced out as a Flash file to which the production team can add more metadata or video as required before posting directly to the web.

“To make it easier for the production teams, the Quick Times have been arranged with templates giving each file a pre-defined size and assigning it a screen ratio, a server location and codec,” explains lead editor Nick Keene. “Likewise the transcode engine has been set up with parameters which will deliver the correct Flash file.”

Green Balloon is one of dozens of BBC Children's productions to benefit from a recently upgraded production system. It includes a new ingest area with monitoring and logging stations, a transfer room to handle a full range of recording formats, and 13 Avid Adrenalines. The Village can now support HD and tapeless working and can repurpose content for web or hand-held devices.