Recording 2-hr live event w/ Pro Tools TDM

[tonerowlabs]

Hi all - many thanks in advance for your advice.

I am in Cambodia preparing to record a live performance of a rock opera for local TV. Consistently clocks in between 1hr 50min to 1hr 55min. 12 mic'd singers (wireless lav) and an orchestra split into Rock (kit, bass, gtr, synth, dig. piano) and Traditional Cambodian ensembles (mixture of winds, strings, chrom. percuss. and drums). I will have about 2 weeks to mix the result, and send in a 16/48 WAV of the whole thing, which will be sync'd to picture at the TV studio.

Note that gear rental is an impossibility.

The live mix is through a fully automated 48-channel mixer. taking a 2-channel mix from the board won't sound good, as the mix is corrective, dealing with a highly problematic space and design.

Tragically the A/C sound is quite loud but there's no way around this (a packed house in Cambodia). The NT5 will LOVE this sound and do everything it can to heighten it.

There are no amplifiers on the rock platform - guitars, bass, synth and piano are all direct (from FX pedals) and the drums are surrounded by shell/cage.

The mixing engineer will give me a total of 9-10 mono sends from the board, and then I will add a RODE NT5 somewhere in the house to get the sound of the room and the audience.

Here's my rig:
Mac g5 dual 1.8, OS 10.4.11, 3GB RAM, 2 internal drives (boot/scratch)
PT HD 7.4, Accel and HD Core card (1 each)
2 x Digi 96 I/0
4 SSL pre's

QUESTIONS:

Can I do a 2 hour 12-track recording in Pro Tools (non-VENUE)?
Should I do 16/48
Will simply stopping and saving half-way through make a difference? (I can request a 30-second mini-intermission for this purpose.)
I have a 12-channel Mackie - should I just do a crude live mix of the sends + NT5 (using headphones and mostly guesswork) and record the stereo outs?
What sends should I ask for?
Should I start with the live sound as the base, and then use the sends to help boost things when needed?
Is hanging the NT5 2 meters above and 1 meter in front of the board, pointed at center stage a good idea?

[Loki]

You can do it. I wouldn't do it at less than 24bit (since it gives you more flexibility later and quite a different level of sound quality)

I'd add another drive to your system, but I'm guessing from your G5 spec that it's one that can only take 2 drives. You could get one of the add in controllers that will allow you to put more drives in (which should be discounted now since current Mac Pros don't need them anymore.)

I'd set disk allocation to round robin between all the available drives you have and make sure in preferences that you change the recording setting to "use all available space" (can't recall how many times that's caught people when it's suddenly stopped recording because a previous engineer changed it to 15mins only)

I'd take any break I could to make sure files are split.

I'd also want a backup system (field recorder, another PT system), but that's true of all recording systems when going live.

[yrplace]

Why the round robin suggestion on the drives? With only 12 tracks recording at 48/ 24 I would think a single drive would be safest.

I agree that some sort of backup would be really smart . With such a small track count even a pair of DA-78's would be better than relying on just one recording unit.

[ghellquist]

Here are my ideas for what they are worth.

1 - you should be able to record 2hours to 12 mono tracks. 2 hours at 48k/24 bits is just above 1G per channel - limit for wave files often is 2G so you should be safe. This should be easy to verify on the equipment in a dry run (do a dry run for two hours!! )

2 - personally, I am no lover of ProTools for mixing long shows. Main reason is that mixes only can be bounced in "real time", ie to export the final show will take 2 hours. In other programs, one example may be Samplitude, the export will run at whatever speed the computer has, perhaps 10 minutes for a two hour mix. Your choice though. You could record with one program and mix with another, done all the time.

3 - check with the mixer how many aux channels they have free. It would probably be a good idea to mixdown stems of instrument groups if you need to go down to 12 channels. Creating the stems then would be by aux mixes in the mixer table and sent to your recording. Preferrably get stems pre-Eq and pre all kinds of faders. Obviously above the number of stems you can get, the rest has to be single channels. If at all possible I would use my own preamp for these, not taking them from the mixer. Live mixers tend to move the gain signals up and down all the time, making life difficult for the recording.

4 - two mics in the audience, why not. They might sound like crap or be quite useful, as long as you have the channels go for it.

5 - even if renting is impossible, do check around for other possibilities. You might be able to find some unused old mixer laying around in the arena that could be the basis for creating a few additional stems.

And lastly, good luck to you. As the old saying goes: if you got luck you don´t need much else.

Gunnar

[tonerowlabs]

first off, thanks to all. internet has been slow, but i still have time to incorporate most of your suggestions.

I'm "stuck" with PT as our rig is built on Digi/PT.

Turns out I can only get 6 mono stems from the board, as the rest are used up. We're working on how to best split them.

I meant NT4, which due to horrific levels of A/C and HVAC noise will only be used for applause. We have two awesome DPA omni's that would be great to hang above the bands, but the only place to put them would be right in front of the A/C vents. I designed acoustic baffles but didn't have enough budget or time to get them made in time. Very frustrating.

confused about two things:

1) It does sound like 2 hours straight of 12 channels at 24/48 is pushing it. Obviously it will sound better than 16/48, but I will only have one dry run, which isn't enough to positively verify system stability. I'd need like 9-10 before feeling confident. We have only one shot to get it, and we don't have any redundancy. 8trk ADAT would have to come from Bangkok or Singapore, and there isn't time or money for that. We will have backups of the stereo mix, but not the stems.

2) Is stopping record, saving, then starting again at 1h 15m going to change anything? If that seemed like a really good idea that would make a difference, I might feel better about going to 24bit.

Thanks again, very appreciative of your time.

[casey_outlaw]

I recently did a two hour live recording on a 003 Rack with PTLE at 24/48 with 18 mono channels onto an Audeum PC. I recorded to a single external drive (Western Digital Mybook 500GB), and after the first dry run, which cut off at just over an hour, the system had no problems. The second dry run went for almost three hours before I turned it off.

The band I was recording had two openers, so I recorded them both as a warmup (just acoustic DI and vocals) after getting the system in place at the venue. The actual show had zero problems. Two hours of set it and forget it (straight to the pre's/converters from a splitter) and then mixed at the studio. It can definitely be done, just make sure to set the record allocation to open ended, and cross your fingers if you don't have a redundant system. I did, and it worked for me.

Here's a pic of the little rig in my travel racks. The Behr.... (ugh) was for the DI's (it was an acoustic based show) and crowd mics, and the Focusrite (Better, but still ugh) did surprisingly well on vocals, drums, electric guitars. They were all clocked together by the Big Ben, which really helped ease my mind about clicks, pops, and getting the most from subpar equipment. My myspace (in my signature) has two tracks, "Lucky" and "Wait", from the show. Can we record for two hours with Pro Tools, Yes We Can!

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

[Loki]

Originally Posted by yrplace

Why the round robin suggestion on the drives? With only 12 tracks recording at 48/ 24 I would think a single drive would be safest.

I agree that some sort of backup would be really smart . With such a small track count even a pair of DA-78's would be better than relying on just one recording unit.

2 reasons for round robin...

if a drive fails, you have at least half your data and

by using round robin, you have two different drives using their write heads concurrently across two platter stacks. Means less work on the drives and better chance of not running into any of ProTools' sometimes wacky err codes.

[Loki]

Originally Posted by tonerowlabs

We have two awesome DPA omni's that would be great to hang above the bands, but the only place to put them would be right in front of the A/C vents. I designed acoustic baffles but didn't have enough budget or time to get them made in time. Very frustrating.

In that case, put the DPA mics pointing upward, low, & down stage with quite a bit of distance to the performers. Use them as a room/distance miking. I doubt any acoustic baffles would really do any good for 4006 mics if it's A/C. (Don't forget, if the hum/buzz is a low enough fundamental, gently denoise with a plugin to get rid of the fundamental and harmonics -- say Waves Z-Noise; you could probably even do it for free if you work quickly in their 14 day demo period)

Originally Posted by tonerowlabs

1) It does sound like 2 hours straight of 12 channels at 24/48 is pushing it. Obviously it will sound better than 16/48, but I will only have one dry run, which isn't enough to positively verify system stability. I'd need like 9-10 before feeling confident.

This has been done before so you're not really breaking new ground -- if that makes you feel better

Originally Posted by tonerowlabs

2) Is stopping record, saving, then starting again at 1h 15m going to change anything? If that seemed like a really good idea that would make a difference, I might feel better about going to 24bit.

Yes, because if ProTools has an error in recording, you tend to lose all the recorded material done up to that point that was in the active recording buffer. If you hit stop (you don't even have to save), that recorded material is all kept permanently at that point (unless, of couse, you hit "Apple + .", in which case it'd be like you never recorded.) There is a plugin designed by some ex ProTools employees that can actively backup a recording session's audio files while recording -- that may be something to look into though I haven't used it. You put an instance of the plugin on every audio track you want to backup and set the frequency (say every 2 mins) and the backup location (once again, hopefully a different drive) and it'll make backups of the current recording stream without having to stop.

I have to say the difference between 16 and 24 from a safety/security standpoint is nothing. All you're doing is losing quality by going 16.

[tonerowlabs]

Followup:

I recorded two performances at 24bit 48kHz. I probably could have recorded for 2hrs straight, but given that I had nearly zero risk-tolerance, I found a spot in the score just over halfway through to stop and start recording, just to split the files. Each mono track was about 670 MB at about 78min.

Pro Tools performed extremely well.

Now I need to clean up huge amounts of HVAC noise, and a horribly-timed siren.

Thanks again for your help.