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Digico Helps RAF’s Children In Need Show to Fly
The end of November saw the BBC’s annual Children In Need appeal taking place, with hundreds of events around the UK raising over £17m for charity.
One of the biggest of these was at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where a 15,000-strong audience enjoyed Status Quo, Jamie Cullum, Tony Christie, Girls Aloud, local Oxfordshire bands Fell City Girl and Harry Angel and the Station Commander’s band bringing up the rear, performing in one of the aerodrome’s hangars.
With such a diverse array of acts, and with extremely tight turnround times between them, it was obvious that the DiGiCo D5 Live was the perfect console for both front of house and monitors. The console’s instantly-recallable snapshot feature was essential if the show was to run smoothly.
“We ran the two D5s on separate stage boxes with an active split to give broadcast their feed, too,” explains the show’s FOH engineer Andy ‘Baggy’ Robinson. “With presenters between bands and VT feeds, there was a lot on one desk, so snapshots was the way to go. Some bands were sharing backline, which made sound checks easier. I just had to make changes to the board and store them separately for each band. Jon Lewis was monitor engineer and he ran his console in the same way as me, but I sent him a mix of the presenters so he had that channel in safe and the rest in shapshots for the bands.”
The complex setup meant Baggy had a full 56-channel stage rack, with CD player and other audio sources in the local rack. But the D5 Live’s versatility meant that a very complex show could be handled smoothly and efficiently.
“It’s effectively like having two desks,” Baggy continues. “I had banks of channels for the presenters, VT feeds etc, in ‘safe’ and then banks for band channels in snapshots. With control groups over the key presenter channels I could have the band banks on display, but still be able to reach a presenter mic very quickly.”
The gig was a huge success and raised a considerable amount for Children In Need. Baggy pronounced himself very pleased with how the show went, aided in no small part by the D5 Live.
“The key is to keep it simple when setting up the desk,” he says. “Think about your layout, about what you want, and there is a way of doing it all on the D5 Live. I was very happy throughout the show and it sounded great too!”
19th December 2005
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