Riedel, ARRI and Gonshiro advance Japan’s cinematic live production
Riedel, ARRI and Gonshiro advance Japan’s cinematic live production
Japan’s growing appetite for large-scale live entertainment is driving closer collaboration between production specialist Gonshiro, Riedel and ARRI, with the companies working to integrate camera, communications and networking workflows.
Gonshiro handles approximately 1,000 live productions each year and is involved in around 60% of Japan’s major concerts, alongside work across entertainment, sports and broadcast. Its production fleet includes 22 ARRI cameras, including 16 Alexa 35 Live units, as well as six Riedel Bolero wireless intercom antennas and 15 beltpacks.
The companies are using Gonshiro’s experience in demanding live environments to inform development priorities around camera-to-intercom integration, network-based LUT and settings management across multicamera deployments, and more compact camera configurations for restricted onstage positions.
“The combination of ARRI and Riedel creates exciting possibilities because cameras, communications, networking, and operations are all part of the same production workflow,” said Yuji Morihara, president and representative director of Gonshiro. “If we can bring together camera systems, tally, talkback, monitoring environments and communications into a more integrated environment, the benefits for live production would be absolutely real.”
Gonshiro has deployed Alexa 35 Live to bring cinema-grade imaging to live entertainment, while Bolero connects camera operators, backstage crews and production staff. Each Bolero beltpack supports up to six channels of send and receive, with centralised management allowing engineers to configure and monitor communications from a single system PC.
“Our goal has always been to create the best possible images while making it easier for crews to do their jobs,” noted Morihara. “As productions grow more demanding and experienced technical staff become harder to find, simplifying workflows will become increasingly important. We want camera operators to focus on creativity, not infrastructure.”
According to ARRI and Riedel, feedback from Gonshiro is helping shape their approach to live-specific product development. “Gonshiro operates one of the largest Alexa 35 Live fleets in the world and their feedback from live music, sports and broadcast work is a direct line into how the camera needs to perform outside of a controlled cinema set,” said Michiyo Funayama, sales manager at ARRI. “That input shapes decisions we make for live production going forward.”
Guillaume Mauffrey, director of sales – Asia at Riedel Communications, added: “We used a combination of Bolero and MediorNet to solve Gonshiro’s recurring problem: keeping large, distributed crews connected without adding friction to the production. Pairing that expertise with ARRI's imaging gives us a much more complete answer for live production teams working at this scale.”
