RF WIRELESS TRAILER ( WHITE AT CORNER ) & DOME PRODUCTIONS JOURNEY & B-UNIT TRUCKS AT 299 QUEEN ST . WEST AHEAD OF THE 2018 IHEARTRADIO MMVAS
That mix was largely handled from a Martin Pilchner-designed audio control room , ACR3 , at 299 Queen St . West that would ’ ve otherwise been unused for the show . The necessary technical components for the system Corcoran designed were basically brought in as a flypack , built around an Avid S3 control surface and Merging Technologies Pyramix and Avid Pro Tools digital workstations .
As an engineer who handles the IP set-ups , control rooms , and interconnectivity across his home campus and other remote productions , Corcoran has his hands full leading up to and during the show in a typical year . Fortunately , this one didn ’ t add any overly stressful challenges despite the ambitious experiment .
“ In general , it doesn ’ t have a huge impact ,” he reinforces . “ Because the Dolby gear sits at the ingress and egress of the system as a whole , I had a similar system to what I ’ d do for our remote production kit and inside the building . And because Dolby sits in an AES stream and all of our devices were 24-bit transparent , everything just went through , so as far as integrating Atmos , it wasn ’ t a very heavy lift .”
The three units he references – all new to the Bellmedia team – are Dolby ’ s DP580 professional reference decoder , DP590 authoring tool , and DP591 broadcast processor . To help with the learning curve , a pair of engineers from Dolby came to Toronto to support the set-up and execution .
“ Out of the box and with the manual and the [ Dolby engineers ] there , it was a fairly painless process for set-up and programming ,” offers Midgley . “ It was a matter of learning how the boxes integrated and what each one did , then figuring out what the GUI was telling you as far as information and metadata , and then setting those parameters . Then , once we had content , it ran really well .”
HOWARD BAGGLEY IN TEMPORARY ATMOS MIX ROOM , ACR3 , AT 299 QUEEN WEST
The control room would get MADI signals from the show router , convert them to Ravenna , and bring them into the two Pyramix environments – one a recorder , one a mix engine – and then into the interfaces on a substantial Ethernet switch . Next , the traffic was sent to the necessary engines and recorders as audio over IP . Components like the Pro Tools backup recording , the Lawo unit doing video embedding , etc . were interfaced via MADI using Merging ’ s Horus units , which convert from Ravenna to other standards .
Consistent with a recent investment at Bellmedia HQ , the monitoring solution for the control room was comprised entirely of Neumann active studio monitors in a 7.1.4 configuration . They achieved this by mounting some truss in the mix suite to properly position the overhead boxes they needed , making for a “ makeshift ” Atmos mix environment .
The only non-digital components in the signal path for the 2018 show were the ambiance mics around the parking lot and on the roof of the building . These are integral to delivering an accurate experience of what it ’ s like being in that packed parking lot for this show , and the goal for 2018 was to see how much of that could transition to audio over IP .
To achieve this , the team invited Anthony Kuzub from Toronto ’ s Ward-Beck Systems to join the crew along with some of his company ’ s preMO mic preamps .
“ All of the ambient mics were delivered to the ambient mix stage over IP , and at the same moment , they installed IP onramps in a few places on Richmond Street – in one of the music trucks , in the main Dome Productions truck , the RF truck [ from Ottawa ’ s RF Wireless ] – so the Ravenna network was really an almost fully parallel piece
SENNHEISER MK4 ON ROOF OF 299 QUEEN ST . WEST FOR AMBIENT MIX of infrastructure , basically floating on top of all of the other wiring in the show to , again , see if in a complicated show like this with a robust architecture , how easy it might be in the future to duplicated that architecture as audio over IP .”
With broadcasters using the consumer Blu-ray spec for content delivery , the best current means of delivering Atmos into the home with UHD picture is via the extra headroom in Dolby Digital Plus JOC ( joint object coding ). This method is somewhat limiting , with 5.1.4 being the best it can manage ( 5.1 surround with four height channels ). In contrast , the cinema variant is typically 7.1.4 . That may not seem like a significant difference , but as Midgley stresses , it is .
“ One of the main differences in live Atmos versus posted Atmos is that extra two channels , which are fairly significant when you ’ re dealing with concert-like material ,” he explains . “ In 5.1.4 , there are only 10 objects available for rendering in addition to a 5.1 ‘ bed layer ’; with 7.1.4 , there are 118 . But while that might feel limiting , it really wasn ’ t . We weren ’ t flying things around , and once we had an idea of where we wanted to start in terms of objects , it was a treat to be able to fine-tune those on the day for a 5.1.4 system .”
For the real-time mix , that meant they could simply take the 5.1 mix
40 • PROFESSIONAL SOUND