BLACKPOOL, United Kingdom – When BBC’s flagship Saturday night Strictly Come Dancing entertainment show relocates once a year from
Elstree Studios to the coruscating Blackpool Tower Ballroom, all the production
infrastructure likewise heads north, with the OB recording trucks set up in a
co-opted scanner park. With the hit show now in its 10th year, BBC Studios and
Post Production’s Andy Tapley, and lead Sound Supervisor, Tony Revell, evolved
an elegant workflow in Blackpool, mixing the show entirely on three HARMAN’s
Studer digital consoles. For the first time on a Strictly OB, the topology was based on a conjoined Vista 8 and
Vista 5, alongside a Vista 1, which handled the surround sound mix within Red
TX’s reconfigured Red II 3D/7.1 OB truck. This also housed a dedicated grams
area.
Both the Vista 1 and
Vista 5 were provided by Terry Tew Sound & Light, along with 60-70 channels
of radio mic and IEMs. Tew also handled RF frequency management.
States Andy Tapley:
“Linking the Studer Vista 8 and Vista 5 Cores via HD provided 96 channel
tie-lines, as well as 64 bi-directional MADI streams between the Vista 1 and
Vista 5; this meant it was easy to sub-mix and main mix between the two.”
Mixing live in the
ballroom was FOH sound engineer Nick Cook. Three of the fibre stageboxes were
located by the splits for radio mics and band circuits with the fourth assigned
to audience mics. (FOH also took its feeds from these splits).
The multis on the OB’s
resident Vista 8, operated by Andy Tapley, carried all band, orchestra and
music circuits as well as the dancers’ radio mics, while two fibre multis to
Tony Revell’s Vista 5 ran 26 audience mics, presenters’, judges’ and vocal
mics.
Both stereo mixes and
surround mixes were created in the OB. Stems were provided to Sound Supervisor
Richard Sillitto who produced a surround mix on the Vista 1 via the Dolby E
encoder and Dolby Audio Tool. The resulting downmix was then compared to Tony
Revell’s stereo mix. “I could precisely match the stereo dynamics Tony was
using by simply interpreting his mix,” states Sillitto. “But the aim of the
surround mix is to put everyone in the best seat in the house; it’s why you
want to hear the audience around you.”
Running the I/O
architecture via optical fibre were four Studer D21m stage boxes — two each
assigned to the Vista 5 and Vista 8 where McBusted were joined by Shirley
Bassey (plus a 12-piece string section and backing vocals). This was in
addition to resident band leader Dave Arch’s 15-piece ensemble, fed via MADI to
the Vista 8, which also handled the string submixes. The Vista 5 provided Grams
feeds to FOH and monitors (sound beds, voice overs, tracks for McBusted and
couples’ rehearsals).
Other add-ons to the
sound desk technology proved equally useful in supporting a first class
production. For example, ‘Virtual Vista’ was used to build the desks and the
Vista ‘Config’ tool used to design the number and type of channels as well as
busses and I/Os for each of the three desks.
“This was really the key
to enabling the Vista 5 and 8 to link cores,” explained Tapley, “It meant I
could build the desk titles with 'Virtual Vista' from the comfort of my sofa! It enabled us to drop
our Configs into Dropbox and compare tie-lines and MADI routing so that by the
time we arrived here we could virtually load the files on USB sticks, and save
as snapshots.” These were used to save band and vocal mixes and prefade
routings to VT of couples’ mics while dancing. Each snapshot on the Vista 8
fired off a MIDI trigger to the Vista 5 so that the snapshots on each desk
would change in unison.
The production team also
called on the Studer VistaMix Plus software resource, assigning four separate
busses and automixing with the Cedar DNS-8 dialogue noise suppressor. “It makes
a huge difference to be able to place the person talking in the centre of the
mix and duck any others rather than having something swimming in open PA,”
Revell remarked. “Each presenter’s and judge’s mic had it’s own Cedar channel
inserted — and this ‘cleaned’ audio was then fed to the VistaMix channel to
further improve the signal.”
The eventual mix transmission
was sent via MADI to the adjacent CTV OB truck where all vision mixing and VT
routing take place.
Tony Revell said: “With
this technology, we are able to build the mix accordingly and it is easy
because of the MADI connectivity. I can write a custom config for the surround
and via an extra MADI card, link all three desks.”
It also enabled the sound
supervisor to fire off different reverbs, running QLab on a MacBook Pro, with
the ‘Theatre Cue’ list containing the snapshots programmed with MIDI cues.
In summary, both Andy
Tapley and Tony Revell say the experience of the conjoined Vista 8 and Vista 5
had been “like having one big desk, requiring just two CAT5 cables to link
them. We were able to replicate the studio operation on the OB and it enabled
us to concentrate on the content without having to worry about the technical
aspects.”
Tony Revell believes that
the Studer set up had been given “the biggest workout we’ve ever known,”
adding, “to be able to sit down and decide how many channels and mix busses we
needed and then customise it for a particular event was really useful.
“It is certainly a huge step forward for us in
delivering a show like Strictly live
to air from an OB,” he concluded.
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