I have just finished working on the Brisbane Festival‘s debut performance of Beautiful Noise. It brought together multitrack audio, timecode syncronised vision and tight lighting cues.
The obvious heart of all this automation was Figure53‘s QLab.
The intent was to deliver timecode to the vision playback system, midi show control (MSC) to the audio desk and either timecode or MSC to lighting.
I was most nervous about vision for this show – to present well to the audience the timing of the visuals need to be frame perfect in synchronisation with audio. We first turned to Humatic‘s ChainGang. There were some teething issues so we tried several other packages, but after some very terse and unhelpful emails back and forth from Humatic support – we got it working.
There are several bugs with ChainGang the most critical of which is that when switching to full screen you loose all indication that the application is working and following timecode. On the other hand it will accept almost any type of major known form of network midi timecode (MTC) from ipMIDI to Apple’s network MIDI.
I simply created an network MIDI port and then created a timecode cue in QLab that sent timecode to that port. this was picked up and followed brilliantly by ChainGang. Every show we had frame accurate visuals perfectly in sync with the audio.
Multi-channel audio playback in QLab has always been super easy. Given the nature of this production and the sound design calling for surround sound we ended up with multitrack uncompressed wave files. The first two tracks were front of house (FOH) left and right and the next two audio tracks the two audience surround sends.
As the show budget was tight we used a Tascam US-1641 for the outputs. The FOH channels were delivered to the audio console, an Avid Venue SC48, via AES/EBU and the two surrounds delivered via the Tascam’s analogue outputs.
It was my intent to deliver MSC commands to the desk to load different scenes to allow changes based on show elements. There are several scenes making use of a hanging mic with varying degrees of echo in the audience surround for example.
In the end time got away from us, so we delivered MTC to the desk – and the operator used this to follow his own cue sheet and made the scene changes manually.
Lighting control was my only technical disappointment with the show. Again, because time got away – my intention of having the lighting desk (a HighEnd Road Hog) follow timecode never became a reality.
If we were to re-mount the production – it really would be critical to ensure that the amazing lighting design was done justice by having the cue’s (at least the tight ones) automatically called by the desk.
