AudioMedia - January 2009 - (Page 35)

REALITY BITES > Opportunities In Reality Five Weeks And Fif t y Two S eats Another recent job on which we used a similar setup was for a TV show called Coach Trip. This was another job for which I was brought in to set up, but was not to go out to shoot (I’m not sure that I could have taken the pace, to be honest). Rob Garcia was to be the recordist, but he was out shooting elsewhere when we were due to be building a rig to record about tracks worth of isos and mixes – on the back of a -seat coach! Coach Trip is now in its third series, and Rob has worked on them all. There are contestants (eight couples) and a tour guide, who travel around Europe on a bus, visiting places and doing ‘stuff’. Every few days, a couple gets voted off the bus, and a new couple replaces them. A good part of the show is shot on the coach, whilst en route to the next place or activity. On previous series the sound has been recorded on all the soundtracks available on a rack of VTRs (there were four soundtracks per VTR, and five VTRs, offering tracks to record on). This year, however, a number of the cameras went HDV, as did the recorders, and we only had two soundtracks available per VTR, meaning there wouldn’t be enough audio tracks available to record onto. I did some measuring up when we recced the coach, and designed some shelves to be fitted in place of a pair of seats. This meant that we could build a rig including the LS - and the LRX , which could be operated by Rob whilst sitting in the ‘comfort’ of a regular coach seat. The install on the coach was uncomfortable to say the least, especially since the remote cameras, vision control, and the VTR farm were all being installed at the same time. Suffice to say that the kit survived a five-week tour, and many thousands of road miles, and worked very well. A great feature of the LRX system is that it will very easily write to two separate HDDs at once, so master and backup HDDs are written simultaneously. During the trip there was a bit of trouble with a TB HDD drive, which I realised after the job was mounted vertically, whereas the backup HDDs were mounted horizontally. Hmmm – I might need to book a short coach ride! My most recent adventure out into multi-track land was to do the audio for a Celebrity Bridge show for Sky Arts. The Yamaha and LRX combo were on parade yet again, doing sterling service. Our new gizmos of intrigue for this shoot were all RF-related. We had to rig to receive twelve radio mics over the entire ground floor of a hotel in St Albans, where we were shooting the show. It wasn’t the greatest area ever covered with radio mics, but there were enough walls and other obstructions that I felt the radio mics might need a little help. I had a chat with the good fellows of Audio Ltd., who suggested that we use two pairs of aerials via an aerial combiner, run through some frequency dividing units to feed different frequencies to different racks of receivers. Truth is that we set it all up, and it simply worked, which on the one hand was most excellent, but on the other meant we had no fun and games. My colleague Tom Barrow and I produced four different mixes (of four different rooms) simultaneously from the one mixing desk, along with two other recordists doing the runaround stuff. What I love about designing and shooting for reality shows is that you never quite know what they’re going to dream up next. Whatever it is, I am sure that it will present me with another of those unmissable ‘opportunities’ that I simply can’t miss out on. ∫ How to make TV on a -seat coach. AUDIO MEDIA JANUARY 2009 35 http://www.zaxcom.com http://www.zaxcom.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of AudioMedia - January 2009

AudioMedia - January 2009 Contents Recording News Post News Broadcast News Geo Focus: India What's Up UK? Special Report: Pimp My Ride AKG C214 Sony Acid Pro 7.0 Final Cut: Mirror's Edge Opportunities in the Reality World She's Got the Look The X-Factor Sadie LRX2 Source Elements Source-Connect 3.1 Buying a Recorder In Control Product Sampler: Trade Shows Video Guide AMSR News Digico SD8 The Last Picture Show File Server

AudioMedia - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.