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Reality Bites for Midas Verona
Manchester-based production company, Multi Media Arts, has selected a Midas Verona 400 and a Venice 160 to use on the second series of ITV1’s hit daytime show, Reality Bites, with celebrity chef Kevin Woodford.
The show is designed for amateur chefs wanting to take on the challenge of running a professional restaurant kitchen catering for 20 covers at any one time, all under the critical eye of chef Kevin Woodford.
Engineer Alan Sheldon felt that the console he used on the first series didn’t give him enough flexibility, so for the second series he looked for an alternative. “I really wanted to use a Midas, but at the time, not being aware of Verona, I thought a Heritage would be overkill. Whilst looking on the website I saw the Verona, which I immediately thought would be perfect. All I had to do then was find one! Fortunately SSE had just taken delivery of their first Verona and were able to let me have it, and I must say it’s been fabulous.” Alan is using the Verona to handle the restaurant sound, which comprises 18 microphones in total, while the Venice is on kitchen duty where engineer Matt Morris has six radio mics and various atmosphere mics to handle.
“We have 12 Sanken PZM microphones placed on the six restaurant tables, which give us plenty of separation,” explained Alan. The individual mics are allocated their own channel on the Verona, which allows the table mix to be balanced on a mic-by-mic basis. These channels are then assigned to a group by table number, which simplifies the mix down to seven faders; six tables plus atmosphere mics. Alan also uses the auxiliaries on the desk to record the tables individually to tape, using aux 1 for table one, aux 2 for table two, etc., which affords him the luxury of a safety backup should he miss a mix point. “Better still,” he continued, “I have routed the returns from tape back into the desk as a safety check then routed these eight channels directly out to a sub-mixer to allow the director to preview the individual tables and direct the camera people accordingly without affecting my mix. I have also routed the talkback system through the desk, which means all the camera people have the restaurant mix plus the talkback live constantly without radio interference, which is a godsend and something I definitely couldn’t have done on the previous desk.”
“I confess, when we first got the Verona, I thought to myself, ‘We’ll never use all 40 channels,’ but we have! Not only all the channels, but virtually all the functions of the desk as well. The more I use it, the more I realise what I can do with it, the better it gets! In fact I’m now at the point where I’m using the desk to almost full capacity, having thought at first that we’d barely use half of it. If the show runs to a third series, we’ll definitely have two Veronas. Now that we know what the desk is capable of, I think Matt could definitely benefit from using one for kitchen sound as well, but in the meantime, I’m a definite convert!”
In picture: engineer Matt Morris, celebrity chef Kevin Woodford, and engineer Alan Sheldon.
15th June 2004
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