Posts tagged Sound
IP Stream: Making Progress
Today we made some serious progress in creating an initial IP stream using a few odd bits of kit lying around room 906. The bodged system myself and Scott came up with consisted of:
- 1 x Cisco DME 1000 (Stream Encoding)
- 1 x Sound Desk (Tone Generation)
- 1 x Composite Signal Generator
- 1 x Picture Monitor (Live View)
- 2 x MacBook Pro Laptops (Stream ReEncoding and Viewing)
Stickaid 2011
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Stickaid2011
This weekend has been a very long yet fun weekend working on Stickaid 2011 with SilverLine Media, at Ravensbourne University, North Greenwich. Stickaid is a 24 hour broadcast streamed live onto Stickam.com and Youtube.com and this year it came from Ravensbourne, with the help of SilverLine providing the stream and many Ravensbourne students filling rolls from Camera Operators to Sound Supervisors to Editing and many more. The students that helped out over the weekend came from all year groups with some only 3 day’s into there courses.
Scott and Russell from Fluxity were originally brought in on Thursday and Friday to rig the events lighting and power. This job turned out to be over complicated due to some poor planning and communication from all parties involved. The rig should have taken only 8-10hours to complete but had to be completely re-worked to overcome the lack of correct power and distribution.
At 5pm on Friday afternoon Tom also joined the frustrated rigging team to assist in finalising some decisions and to get the rig moving again. The rig was finally completed at approximately 11.45pm on the Friday, with only a quick focus and program to be completed in the two hours before the 12Midday Broadcast start. Programming was completed during the first couple of hours of broadcast by Charlie Fox and Scott.
Fluxity Lighting was kept on call during the event for power and other related problems, and we are very pleased to report that we didn’t receive a single call, and the system was stable and survived the full 24hours.
Scott, Tom and Russell turned up at about 11am on Sunday for the De-rig that was due to begin at about 12.15pm. Between the three of us we had all of the lighting power and staging out of the rig and Ravensbourne back to how it was, in just under 6 hours, in a very relaxed yet steady de-rig.
All in all a long weekend in which we helped raise over £17000 for Unicef. It’s not too late to Donate still, just click on the logo above.
Here’s what Elliot from SilverLine Media had to say about working with Fluxity, over this last weekend:
Scott, Russell and in the end Tom, helped us Thursday, Friday and when I honestly thought that we weren’t going to have the lights going or anything, 2 hrs before TX they made it all happen. Thank you so much guys, especially for dealing so well with my screw ups and then the de-rig on Sunday!
CIRCUS: Studio Sound
0My final main Circus session today was on Studio Sound, and how it can make or break a live or as live television production. Bellow is what i had to say about today, in my circus report:
Studio sound is quite similar to Location sound, with the main difference being the amount of microphones / audio sources you can mix and output. In a studio mixer you can also use techniques such as Compression, Effects (Reverb, Delay and such), and Limiting.
In the studio at Ravensbourne there are 3 wall boxes each with a set of input / output tie-line which link back to the sound gallery. Each socket from this wall box can then be patched to any channel on the Solid State Logic C10, digital sound mixing desk. Each socket could be patched as an aux on the desk, allowing you to feed particular channels into the studio, for example as monitors for a band.
Each channel in the SSL C10 can have its own effects and compression applied to it which can be very useful in a band / interview situation, were you would like some reverb on the performance mic’s and nothing on the interviewees. Also each channel can be supplied with phantom power individually; this means that if you have microphones or other equipment that require phantom to operate, they can be supplied with it, without the rest of the inputs being affected. Some older sound desks only supply phantom to all or nothing, this can cause some problems with sensitive equipment.
The SSL C10 can handle “64 full input channels, each with dedicated 4-band EQ, Comp/Lim, Insert, Direct Output”5 as well as “16 dedicated mono Mix Minus buses with insert points, can be stereo-linked”5, all of which allows the sound supervisor to provide the studio floor / in ear monitoring all different mixes. For example a presenter will want to hear the Director, PA, and VT’s but they don’t want to hear themselves.
CIRCUS: Location Sound
0Another day, another circus Session this time we were learning about location sound. this is what i wrote about it for my Circus Report:
Locations sound works hand in hand with location camera’s providing additional sound capabilities to the single camera, for example an interview situation that required two personal mic’s could be mixed together before being fed to the camera as stereo or mono line level mix. Location mixers often have 2-4 inputs and can either mix in stereo or dual mono. Location mixers normally have better Microphone pre-amps than Camera’s, which in turn provides better sound quality, as the mixer is outputting at line level (0db) and the camera won’t apply any more amplification to the signal.
Some microphones require batteries or phantom power (+48v) to operate; these mic’s are a form of capacitor mic’s are much more sensitive than standard dynamic mic’s that don’t require power to operate. Most cameras and mixers can supply phantom power to these microphones.
When setting up for a shoot, you can use the tone that the mixer is supplying to the camera to help setup the record levels on the camera. Tone should be set just below the 0db mark as this allows some “head room” before the camera starts to clip the signal should you go above the tone volume.