Ode to Twitter

Posted by on Jan 21, 2009 in blog, Other | 0 comments

I have a hard time posting here.  If you’ve been following me for a while, you already know that.  I have a tendency to need to wait for big epic topics before I’ll take the time to post here and I’m going to try to do better at that.  But who knows if I will be successful?  I’ve been saying I want to be better at it for a while now.  I do have a bunch of posts scheduled in the queue now to go up over the next days.

In the meantime, I love Twitter and am much better at posting there.  Check it out if you haven’t already.  

I’ve also redesigned and simplified the personal website a bit over the past few days.  Check it out as well.

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New Broadcast Processing Part 1

Posted by on Jan 21, 2009 in blog, Digidesign Venue, System Configuration, Techniques | 1 comment

I’ve mentioned our broadcast mix chain several times but have yet to really outline what we’re doing as of late.  Inspired by some good friends, I began a journey about 5 months ago to re-engineer the chain.  The signal chain I inherited when I started at Kensington was based around a model picked up from Willow Creek in Chicago.  You can read more about it here.  Basically, everything through the console is split up to two main outputs – one for music, and one for speech.  That way each can be processed independently, then combined and leveled to create the broadcast feed.  A single set of ambience mics are added to the feed and ducked by the music mix to mask transitions in the console when nothing was passing but otherwise stay out of the way so the mix would be very present and the result is a pretty solid product.

This worked really well and was a great improvement from previous incarnations, but the biggest critique of our video mixes was what I would call “overprocessing” – almost a studio quality to the mix rather than feeling more organic and live, and a severe lack of audience and room ambience to the mix.  In fact, whenever something artistic was happening on stage, the ambience mics were ducked out tremendously.  Our feed to broadcast often times sounded more like a studio recording with audience applause when nothing was happening on stage rather than an organic live album that accurately reflected what it actually felt like to be in the room for the service.

When we upgraded our system to the Digidesign Venue platform last Summer, I took it as the opportunity to revamp the broadcast chain to move a different direction philosophically.  Goals for the new approach:

  • Experience listening to the mix would become more holistic of what it actually was to sit in the room – more ambience & audience, less processing, more live and organic
  • Consistent product based on what’s happening in the room that translates well week to week with no outside input (i.e. no surprises – if it worked in the room, it will work on tape)
  • All processing completed inside the console so it would be easily repeatable in other venues, but transparent enough to the audio engineer that guys with different approaches using the same console would not be hindered or distracted by the outside world feeds.

My next post will outline the steps we’ve taken to implement a new process.

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