Over the last few weeks I have been involved with the Australian Museums Jurassic Lounge event, as a sound professional. This involved pushing equipment packers around and setting things up and most excitingly running the front of house desk for the bands we have had coming through! Over the last few weeks we have had The Walking Who, Shady Lane, Iluka, & Richie 1250 & The Brides of Christ all come through the venue and play gigs. The bands haven’t been half bad, most of them have record deals and all the social media that comes along with that, so you can go and listen to them. The guys have all been very happy with my work and are always stoked when we pump up the PA and they realise how loud it is and that they can hear stuff…. that’s always nice. Anyway this is all a bit late in the piece now since this season of Jurassic lounge has finished. But don’t be sad…. there will be a new season for Sydney siders this spring, and yours truly will be front and center ripping things up on the sound desk! Keep you eyes on this blog and I will be sure to let you know when things kick off……
Category Archives: Live Sound
How to record a video conference
So over the last few days I have been working out at Homebush at the V8 Supercars event. Once again I was working for DART as the sound guy and working with another company called Powa Productions to deliver a video conference into about 30 schools throughout NSW. This was a pretty straight forward gig, unlike previous V/C’s! This time all I really had to do was take a feed from the V/C codec and send that to the FOH desk then take a feed back from the stage mics back into the codec. I patched this all through my desk and took an AUX out to record everything into my Zoom recorder… simple… and it really was! This time however I did something a little different when I recorded. I took each side of the call, the local end, and the remote end, and split them into separate tracks on the recorder. This gave me the local stage mics on channel 1 and the remote classrooms on channel 2. This then allowed be to cut the tracks up and mix it down in post-production and get a nice clean recording. Generally there is so much background noise and echo coming from the remote end than if you record it all into one track to gets messy and garbled, not this time however. The result was great the the client very happy!
Video Conferencing to Alaska!
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.