Some of you may have noticed this photo on my Facebook stream earlier in the day. It’s a shot of the production setup for a video conferencing shoot that I was working on through my business. I have been working with the New South Wales Department of Education to deliver video conferences into schools around the state and overseas, of-course I am the sound tech. This is a very challenging job, because the sound is not straight forward. At a shoot like this I am expected to keep track of the front of house levels and levels to at least three other Aux’s, I need to monitor them all myself and make sure that there is no feedback at front of house. The feeds are all different and I have to be careful not so send the output of the Video Conferencing codec back into itself, which would cause serious feedback to the listeners on the far end. But the most challenging thing is the unknowns at the remote end, often they are school teachers with little technical knowledge and many of the setups are different, which means the sound feeds are usually all very different and I have to compensate with compression and clever fader movements. This is the second job like this I have done with them and there are still a few glitches to iron out, it’s close, but still a few things to sort out before we get it 100% right….. I love a challenge like this.