Being the first to use a brand-new mixing console is an exciting prospect, but when your venue is on the roof of a busy international airport that has never needed a goods lift, logistics suddenly become a very high priority, as Tristan Mazire found out during preparations for a secret event on the roof of the iconic Terminal One Building, Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport on July 17th.
The event was planned as part of Olympic Celebrations and live-streamed via Amazon Music’s Twitch channel to huge audiences. The entire proceedings, from set-up to pack-down, were also recorded for a feature film to be aired later in the year. Mazire captured the whole event live, whilst mixing for the live stream and the roof-top audience of 2,000.
The specially created audience areas were filled with a mixture of invited guests and lucky Parisians who had won the chance to be there on the night via an event ticket lottery. There were live performances from Phoenix, AIR and Zaho de Sagazan, plus DJ sets from Etienne de Crecy and Inès Mélia. The event was a glittering example of French cultural excellence and highlighted the role of the airport as a gateway to the summer’s festivities.
Mazire, sound engineer, product specialist at DiGiCo and co-owner of Paris-based consultancy company, The Audio Agency, is well versed in mixing high profile multi-media events. But being part of a secret performance, with little time to rehearse and a backdrop of landing passenger jets, is enough to make even the most gig-hardened professional get excited.
“The original plan was to use two Quantum 338s in Mirror Mode, but French partners MPM: Audio, Lighting, Video had just taken delivery of a brand-new Quantum 852,” he says. “Because of the longstanding relationship between our companies, they were willing to let me do something a little bit crazy with it.”
The Audio Agency is renowned for facilitating high profile, filmed events, and getting equipment into unusual venues is always a major consideration. When your location is the roof of a large airport terminal, it makes things even more complicated. Much of the equipment was manually taken to the roof, but with the larger items, including the Quantum 852, a helicopter was employed to lower equipment into place.
Once in position, the flexibility of the Quantum 852 surface meant that two engineers could work side by side if needed, which was essential because the show ran for three hours, broadcasting constantly, without breaks.
“The plan was always to have multiple cameras, with live vision mixing, and to stay broadcasting the entire time,” says Mazire. “We had lots of surprises planned, but everything happened live, except some recorded footage at the beginning and end of the evening.”
Staying on air for that long is a formidable task, but one that using DiGiCo products makes possible, thanks to their range of solutions that are now available and fully compatible with the Quantum range.
With minimal rehearsal time, Mazire needed to be meticulously organised. His system was designed with built-in redundancy to ensure nothing interrupted the broadcast or recording. The Quantum 852 utilised its two engines, and the Orange Box and SD Racks were run in a loop, with dual power supplies, plus analogue and digital outputs, so Mazire was certain the signal would get through, whatever happened on the night.
“Because of the type of event, I couldn’t have a single point of failure,” he explains. “It was a lot of responsibility and because of the location, everything had to be as small as possible, there was no OB truck, no fixed gallery, everything was all in flight cases and manoeuvrable, so nothing was ever in shot that didn’t have to be.”
Thanks to the variety of solutions that DiGiCo offers, Mazire could design the entire signal path around DiGiCo products, increasing reliability and compatibility whilst reducing the need for additional on-site network testing time.
“When I first started, around 20 years ago, I would have to use many different brands to complete a system design like this. You had to trust that everything would work together and that there were no firmware issues or compatibility problems. Now, thanks to DiGiCo’s range, I can be confident that my set-up will work straight away. It’s so flexible and the Optocore protocol is strong. It makes projects like this much more possible.”
Setting up an event when you know it is going to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people has additional pressures, not only does your equipment need to work seamlessly, it needs to be discreet. Wherever possible, Mazire used small, multi-purpose units, with minimal cable runs to ensure the sound equipment was as hidden as possible and not likely to trip up any of the camera or drone operators capturing the performances.
“DiGiCo is like a Swiss Army knife! it has so many nice products, I can always find something for every situation,” Mazire concludes. “There are more and more projects like this now, events that cross the boundary of live and studio sound. The tools that DiGiCo offers have the precision of studio processing within the consoles, so I now have the flexibility to sit comfortably in both worlds.”
