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Common Goal

Oct 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Story and photos by Bill Miller

As with any live concert, getting bands on and off the stage is time-consuming. Spevak fills the dead zone with performances from earlier in day, Farm Aid awareness pitches, and prerecorded segments. An ENG crew has been on the grounds since the early morning with a Sony PMW-EX3 gathering material for these 1-minute-to-3-minutes cut-ins.

The EX3 has two memory card slots, which means with a pair of 16GB SxS Pro memory cards, it can record up to 140 minutes of HD footage. With little time to spare between recording, editing, and playback, it's an ideal solution for high-speed, on-the-run production. (Read more about the EX3 on p. 18 of this issue.)

The camera crew has lots of toys to play with, including 12 high-definition cameras for the live feed. Two Sony HDC-900s are mounted on Chapman/Leonard cranes, one HDC-950 is on a 24ft. Stanton Video Services Jimmy Jib, and two HDC-1000s are on J.L. Fischer Model 10 dollies that roll on 150ft. of track just above the expensive seats. The other 950s are hard-mounted or handheld.

The camera operators are a mixture of sports and music shooters, all veterans of the game and most of whom Jordan has worked with before during his 25-year career shooting concerts.

Speaking to one of 15 camera people on the shoot, I wanted to know what it takes to get good enough to get your name called for a high-profile music concert such as Farm Aid. “It takes practice, practice, practice,” says camera operator Lyn Noland, one of the few women on the technical crew. “It's like playing an instrument. The more you play it, the better you are.” She has been shooting for 25 years and she's very good, often getting the extremely prestigious close-up camera angles. Today, she's riding a Model 10 dolly. It's not a bad seat, 30 rows up from center stage.

Catching all the footage are two 6-channel EVS Group hard-disk recorders in the All Mobile Video Resolution multiformat production truck. It's almost a day off for EVS operators Dan Phipps and Jeff Watson, who are used to the hectic pace of sporting events where instant replay keeps them hopping. Watson calls the EVS hard-disk nonlinear editors the coolest TiVo machines in the world.

“This has six channels,” he says. “I can record and output three things at the same time. With tape machines, you would have to stop the record process to go to the playback mode. Here, it is always in the record mode. Everything is random access. We are recording the actual concert as it happens and editing certain songs out for rebroadcast later in the show. When I first started 16 years ago, it was reel-to-reel, 1in. tape machines. We operated the slo-mo by hand. You actually put your hands on the reels and turned them by hand to create the slo-mo effect. Now it's a push of a button. It's all disc-based, tapeless.”

In addition to All Mobile Video, Ambassador Entertainment employed the services of East Coast Digital, a New York-based nonlinear editing group. East Coast President Scott Kleinberger and veteran editor Virginia McGinnis are at the keyboards in front of two Apple Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 nonlinear editing systems. Both edit bays have Intel eight-core Macs. One unit uses an AJA Kona card, and the other one has a Blackmagic Design DeckLink HD Pro card, which can import files directly from the EX3 being used by the ENG crew.

McGinnis says she loves the pressure of the job. “The hardest part of my job is the pressure, but that's also the most exciting part. It's very rewarding,” she says. “You do four or five packages in a day, and it's aired live. It's up there and its over. My day's done. Most of the time, I am handed the footage and told to make it look and sound great. That's the way I prefer working, without a producer hanging over my shoulder.” She smiles and hits playback on the package under construction. With SDI output directly from the desktop, packages can go live to air via SDI terminals. McGinnis is a pro on both Avid and Final Cut Pro, and she leaves it up to the client as which system she'll be working on.

Usually audio is relegated to the rear of the production bus and takes a back seat to the visual aspects of a broadcast. Not on this broadcast. Not at this concert. The sound has equal rank. To make sure the quality is there, the Sony Oxford R-3 120-input digital console mixing board is manned by Michael Abbott, whose work has included the Grammy Awards, HBO specials, and the Country Music Awards. The mix board has 96 channels of analog mic preamps in, 16 audio loops, 24 aux sends, and 48 multitrack sends. The output is a 5.1 Dolby surround-sound signal plus an LTRT signal. (Left total, right total are the names given to the left and right channels of a 2-channel audio signal that contains Dolby surround-encoded information.) With a crew of 12 audio techs, Abbott says his job entails compositing all the mixed tracks from the concert audio truck with DirecTV's production microphones; all the audience-reaction microphones; all the EVS hard-disk playbacks; and all the communications: PLs, wireless IFBs, and hardwire IFBs.

“I take a lot of pride in the project management, which is part of my job,” Abbott says. “Managing personnel and equipment is a collaborative effort. You leave your ego at home.” He makes sure I understand that the hard part is getting ready for the show, making sure everything is working properly and plugged into the right place. After that, mixing the show is a breeze. Or so he says.

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