Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500728
56 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2023 solution was a lot of rehearsals, MIDI cue points, math equations, and headaches. I built a system that can drive Unreal Engine from Pro Tools through MIDI, LTC timecode, and GPIO. This information was generated by Pro Tools with stems for monitoring, as well as crowd interaction and FX triggering via Ableton Live. It all interfaced with Unreal and the BTS camera for live picture-in-picture, and everything was in tri-level sync feeding a TriCaster. Some of the issues we faced in this process were calibrating the synchronization between various peripherals, even down to house sync and black burst. The face motion capture was about 23ms offset from body capture, which had to be ironed out by employing certain system delays. This also meant we needed to delay the audio by 384ms while still having the music in real-time for Bieber to perform. It ended up requiring a lot of different bussing and variable delays, including audio reactivity, which altered the lighting and graphics in the Unreal universe according to music intensity. We developed a method for global sync calibration, where a technician wore the suit while moving to the beat and counted out loud so we could line up the body, face, and audio for all moving parts. We ran it for the duration of the concert to verify any detectable drift and cross-checked it with a 2-pop at the beginning and end of the show. All interconnects for our department were done using Dante and NDI on four computers. We had two identical Pro Tools HDX systems—one for playback and one for mixing. The other two computers were for systems management and crowd/FX triggers via Ableton. We controlled everything with two Avid S3's, interfaced with Focusrite Red 8Pre's, and recorded the whole thing on the good old Sound Devices 970. The result was music playback driving all visual cues and scenes within Unreal Engine while Bieber wore the suit to drive his avatar in that world. I got to work with one of my childhood best friends on this one, Will Thoren. This job was technologically ambitious and great to share together. It was also a good lesson in staying organized when it's necessary to go big with our rigs. Dolby Atmos Comedy Show in Dane Cook's Backyard Lately, I've been working in the niche circuit of live comedy, and we have a system for turning over Atmos-deliverable recordings. Here's how: My friend Thomas Cassetta does quite a lot of this work, and we usually do a lot of the production and post-sound on these together. On this one, I was the Production Mixer and Supervising Sound Editor, and he was the Re-recording Mixer. I've always found it to be an informative process to do both. Tom is a stellar colleague, and a pleasure to work with. On live comedy, we like to use the Midas M32/970 workflow and boom recorder as backup. I've had a lot of success with those machines for higher track counts where you can't have anything fail and millions of people are watching. Live comedy is a similar idea. My rig for this is fairly basic and