AudioMedia - February 2009 - (Page 40)

a (high definition) night at the opera which is usually enough for our purposes; we tend to have a maximum of about 100 mic channels coming from the stage. Mind you, you can always use more tracks…” “Everything worked really well for a couple of years, although there wasn’t space in the sound control room for the B&W surround monitors we’d bought, so we could only handle audio in stereo. In fact, once the Vista desk Mark Thackeray, Royal Opera House Broadcast Engineer. and Pyramix were in there, to be one that they use in a lot of their broadcast there wasn’t room for very much else at all!” facilities, with Pyramix handling the multi-track mixing and recording. And back then, Pyramix You Are Surrounded was the only DAW that would lock to HD video. The situation changed when the ROH purchased We use one system to record and one as a backup music DVD company Opus Arte in 2007. “The idea at the recording stage, and then when it comes was to create more of a catalogue by producing our to post-production we often use one system as own in-house DVDs of productions that had been an editor while another team mixes on the other. staged here, as opposed to buying productions Each one gives us up to 128 tracks to work with, from the BBC that they had filmed here,” explains Thackeray. “To do that, we needed a sound room where we could mix in surround for the DVDs, and the old one just wasn’t up to it. So some money was made available to allow us to develop a new audio control room. We knocked together two existing rooms, Graham Whitehead and his company Ethos Acoustics took care of the acoustic treatment, and we were in by Spring last year. We were producing our first DVD by May – the move was very painless, again because we had such good infrastructure in place. We just needed to wire in a new patchbay. The Studer surface is just a controller, essentially, so that only needed a fibre link and a couple of serial connections to be run under the floor, and the Pyramixes are on KVM switchers, so we had to patch a couple of CAT5 cables through to the new room. Then we just carried the gear across.” If space was an issue before, it certainly isn’t now. Dominating the control room is a new 40-inch video monitor for dubbing work, joined by the Studer Vista 8, the Pyramix DAWs and associated Merging Isis transport controller, a Lexicon 960L surround reverb, and the B&W 802D speakers and 801D subwoofer from the original control room. To this have been added the floor-standing B&W 802 surround monitors that couldn’t previously be used. Most A-D conversion is handled by the Vista 8, although a DAD converter is available to be pressed into service if required. A recently added Sound Devices hard disk recorder and HHB DualBurn CD-R (for backups) complete the picture. “Because we owned the larger B&W 802s already, we didn’t need to add very much,” explains Thackeray. “It was nice to have the large video monitor – we didn’t have room for anything like that in the old room – and we upgraded the Pyramix systems to version 6 via Merging’s UK distributor eMerging when we moved those over. We also expanded our existing RAID array, adding a lot of new 500GB SATA drives.” “We dub to picture from the DS Player in Pyramix, or from a two-channel DoReMi hard disk video recorder we already had – you just stick a nine-pin connection in the back and Pyramix will merrily chase the video. Quite often we record the main vision mix, and add a permanent wide angle shot of the stage on the other channel. That’s really useful at the dub, especially in busy operas where everyone is moving around, because you can see where everyone is on the stage and mix the surround accordingly.” Since the refit, the ROH team has produced several DVDs with surround and stereo soundtracks, as well as continuing to oversee live audio and TV broadcasts. They’ve even begun broadcasting to cinemas and large-screen setups in town centres (see box). “If the transmissions aren’t live, we like to do separate audio mixes for cinema, for the 5.1 and stereo mixes for DVD, and for stereo radio broadcast,” explains Thackeray. “With this system, it’s no problem.” In short, it seems the new system is delivering everything that was required of it. Mark Thackeray has the final word. “This year, we'll be filming eight to ten shows, and putting all of those out on DVD, and some through cinemas. And the BBC will co-produce some of those, and pick up some of them for transmission. Essentially, we've moved from a situation where we used to buy stuff from broadcasters to the opposite, where we can now supply recordings to them, which is great.” ∫ 40 audio media february 2009 ROH Live & D irec t http://www.seelectronics.com http://www.sonic-distribution.com http://www.sonic-distribution.com

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AudioMedia - February 2009 Contents Recording News Post News Broadcast News GEO Focus: USA What's Up UK NAMM Review For the Record Project Profile: Hallelujah HHB CDR882 KORG MR-20005 Chandler Germanium Brauner Phanthera Final Cut: Lesbian Vampire Killers SE Electronics RNR1 The Royal Opera House Fairlight XYNERGI Limiting Loudness Product Sampler: Studio Consoles Video Guide AMSR News Stone Temple Pilots Fly Again Rode M2 Yamaha IM8 Series

AudioMedia - February 2009

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