Another awards show thread

[huub]

Hi remotesters,

Just wanted to share with you guys that I just came back from Nigeria, where I mixed the broadcast for the first music television awards show in Africa..
Man, it was quite a job... I was brought in fairly late (well, very late, only a few days before the gig I was actually sure I was going), so I had very little influence over the choice of equipment.. Also the nigerian power kept dying (see some pictures of the various generators we used over time Music Television awards, Nigeria - a set on Flickr )
And the way the tv gallery was set up (director and audio in same room) made it realy hard to make a decent mix.. In the end I used bose noise cancelling headphones, with a small earpiece for my intercom..
It was chaos from time to time: the stage did not arrive in time as the boat with the stage could not be unloaded as the harbour was full, the PA towers were on the same boat, so they had to place their stacks on the floor..
The tv equipment was too late, because the plane with the equipment was not completely unloaded when it flew back (to south africa, where all equipment and some of the crew came from).
And everybody was so stressed that there were quite a bit of arguments here and there
The game and kelly rowland were performing amongst others..

[Jules]

Wow, crazy set up, look like in the middle of nowhere!

[Remoteness]

Man, that's a drag.

In the end how did everything come about?

Were you able to get a mix on?
Do you have an opportunity to re-mix in post?

I saw the Flicker photos...
Did you get a chance to take any additional pictures of the production set?

[huub]

I have some more pics, I'll put em up in a next post..

I was mixing on a soundcraft series 5 48 channel console (not crap, but also not the quality I'm used to mixing on), I brought my own neve 33609 for the stereo buss, as the compressors provided were kind of crappy (rane and those 4 channel dbx pieces of crap).
I was providing submixes of handheld radio mics, rf camera mics and podium mics to the PA, which is a total nightmare setup! Someone before had thought this up, and it was too late to change it, as the FOH console did not have enough inputs for both music and all pesentation mics. The FOH guy (pierre, a very cool south african guy from gearhouse) had the worst job; the venue had HUUUUUUUUUUGE 12 second reverb, the stack could not be flown, basically he had an impossible task..
Sadly I did not mix the music, and italian guy named marco cappiaccioni did this with a setup (hired from a south african company) using a digital mixer I did not recognize (edit: It's an innovason sy48) and the usual RME madi stuff. They went ethernet sound from stage to controlroom, but I really had no time to check that all out .
The music was multitracked, and i put some prefade iso feeds to vtr tracks for possible remixing.
I'm not really proud of the end product, but it was pure survival ... We had no dress rehearsal..

[dirkjan]

Wow, the pictures of the first two generators!

Were they seriously considering to use these ones???

[huub]

Well, they were rejected right away.. funny thing is, the first one was the only one that kept on working all along..