Professional Sound - October 2020 | Page 29

PHOTO : PAUL GRANT
Den and Family Feud Canada . This resulted in a few seamless changes to our operation for the shows in order to achieve the desired result . Maintaining social distancing while making television is not easy . Studio load-ins and crew set-ups are quite different during the pandemic . Crew are pre-assigned an elevator they must take within a designated time , and overall traffic in our production spaces is tightly managed . Once in their assigned position , crew are encouraged not to leave their positions unless absolutely necessary to keep everyone in the studio safe .
Shows that would normally host an audience of 200 people and more than a dozen people in the control room will change for the foreseeable future . At the time of writing this article , no audiences will be allowed for Family Feud Canada , which may change the energy and dynamics of the show during tapings . Dragons ’ Den presents its own challenges . The Dragons will now all
ANGELINE TETTEH-WAYOE PRESENTS DURING THE 2020 JUNO AWARDS
VIRTUAL BROADCAST be six feet apart , not side by side . Some of the pitching entrepreneurs who would normally be onsite , with up to 12 pitches being shot per day , will be handled much differently with less interaction with crew and production . All the props for the pitches will be thoroughly cleaned after entering the building before they can go on set . Only pitchers from Ontario and Quebec will physically be here ; the rest will all be done as remotes .
Our future path is committed to AES67- SMPTE2110-30 infrastructure and solutions . Our planning is based on a future where more devices can communicate between each other in an all-IP world . Through all of this , our goal is to keep Canadians informed and entertained with the best-possible production quality and – most importantly – keeping everyone safe .
This article features contributions from CBC ’ s Francois Turenne , Roberto Capretta , Ron Searles , TJ Heideman , Dinu Cebzan , Andrew Roberts , and Chris Jackson .
ONE-ON-ONE WITH DAVID ALLMARK , TECHNICAL PRODUCER , CBC TORONTO
PS : Give us an idea of how you and your colleagues initially came together in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and figured out how you ’ d be able to continue working to the best of your abilities while keeping people safe . What did that process initially look like ?
David Allmark : From a technical standpoint , we had been pushing for the last three years or so to do a lot more IP-based production and REMI production , so this really was an excuse to jump in with both feet and really get it going . We had a lot of gear that we ’ d purchased and were trying to move our production groups towards it . When the pandemic came , there was no choice ; we had to do it , and we were lucky to be fairly ready .
We knew very early it was going to be virtual , and we didn ’ t want anyone in the building at all if possible , so we toyed with all kinds of options in terms of , could we control all of the gear from people ’ s houses and that kind of thing . Actually getting the gear out and relying on [ staff members ’] internet at home seemed a bit daunting , so we tried to create as small of a technical crew as possible [ at HQ ], so we pretty much got our crews down to three people – an audio person , switcher or technical director , and myself – and kept all of our production staff at home . We were able to
do that by streaming multi-views to their homes , so all the producers ran with at least two streaming feeds to see everything we were seeing in the control room .
A lot of our initial content was pre-recorded and we would send it off to be edited , so our editors were working at home and we had some co-productions with other outside companies , so we were gathering all the pieces and then sending them to be edited via FTP transports that are part of our workflow anyway .
What was interesting was we had a lot of issues with people ’ s internet dropping – and these are people with good , high-speed internet , so we moved towards using Wi-Fi with a little bit of cellular to boost it , and that ’ s how those systems worked best .
PS : Tell us more about that process of working with external guests or performers that you were bringing into your world . Did you get settled into a workflow where you could walk people through best practices to ensure you were getting the type of content you needed ?
Allmark : Yeah . We learned really quickly what wasn ’ t working well [ laughs ] and that was the audio quality from Bluetooth headsets . It seems the compression with Bluetooth is not very good . Take the
AirPod microphone compared to the standard Apple wired headset – night and day in terms of sound quality . So we asked people to dig out their old white headphones because they sound way better . We had to do a lot of post , of course , but a lot of those raw recordings were coming from Apple headsets and actually sounded really good .
PS : Looking ahead to , say , the rescheduled 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo , considering things are still changing almost daily , how are you and your colleagues approaching your plans for this and other such events that still have so many unknowns ?
Allmark : The pandemic has taught us that nothing ’ s going to be normal and we can never assume we ’ ll be able to do things like we used to . For the most part , we ’ re still waiting on a lot of answers from [ Olympic Broadcast Services ] on how we ’ re going to move forward , so we ’ ve had to put together multiple different scenarios so we have them ready to go , depending on what we ’ re told and the information we get .
People are also worried about a second wave . Is that going to come ? Maybe . Maybe not . If it does , we ’ ll have to come up with different plans ; if it doesn ’ t , we can probably move ahead with some of the plans we have now .
PS : Which new components of your pandemic workflow do you think might be useful to operations going forward ?
Allmark : One of the big things has been finding encoders and decoders that are extremely low-latency . Moving forward , our big focus is getting latency down as low as possible . It helps everybody , especially when you ’ re using multiple encoders and decoders to bring content together .
PS : What are one or two of the biggest lessons that aren ’ t specifically technical that you or your colleagues have taken away from this experience that you think will help you to do your jobs better even after we ’ re on the other side of this ordeal ?
Allmark : A big one for us just recently is we ’ ve temporarily put a whole bunch of computers in all of our control rooms to be able to accept Zoom calls , Skype calls – anything you can imagine . We had an option to use OBS [ Open Broadcaster Software ] and had to figure out how to integrate that into our regular control rooms where we ’ d never used OBS before . Basically , nothing ’ s off the table ; we ’ re looking at everything and have to be as flexible as possible .
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