Pyramix records Live 8 for BBC DVD

The only multi-track recording of Live 8 was made by the BBC for a major DVD release of the event in a few weeks time.
The Hyde Park event, due to feature in the lion’s share of the DVD, was recorded using five of Merging Technologies’ Pyramix DAW recorders supplied and manned free of charge by Merging’s UK Distributor Total Audio Solutions. The video feed for the DVD was recorded onto two of Merging’s VCube HD Video Recorders.
BBC Sound supervisor Julian Gough was in charge of the recording in the BBC’s Mastersound truck and the team comprised of Total Audio Solutions’ Kevin McCue, Product Specialist and Paul Mortimer, Business Manager, who explained how it came about: “The BBC have been using Pyramix for three years now and they asked us to provide and support a further four systems for this event as it is their preferred hard disc multitrack recording system.
“In total we had five Pyramix systems in the Soundtruck. Two were for the 56 tracks of the main recording from the stages – one primary and one as a back-up, and two were recording the announcers, commentary and audience sounds from all around the arena. This consisted of up to 40 tracks as well!
“The fifth machine was essentially a spare which was idling, chasing code, ready to be used if required.
“In addition we had two Merging VCubes which were fed composit and SDI feeds of the live picture mix and recorded the entire event to hard disc. This was the visual recording which will be used for the post production DVD mix.”
Each Pyramix was equipped with two Mykerinos MB5 DSP cards with MADI and AES/EBU i/o daughter cards. The BBC’s Pyramix in the Master Soundtruck has an external 4 bay SCSI RAID 5 array. The two main stage recorders were writing to an ADTX L series mass storage array supplied by Global Distribution Ltd configured with 15 SATA drives running in two groups of seven with one control drive and connected to the Pyramix systems via 2GB fibre. Also configured in a RAID 5 array for total redundancy so that one drive in each group could fail and the system could still fully function an remain in record.
The two Stages; A and B, revolved with each change of artist and the feeds were sent to 2 BBC radio trucks for live transmission, with a truck mixing and transmitting the output of 56 tracks from each stage. These primary feeds also went to the Soundtruck for recording to Pyramix. The machines were fed via MADI using the Nexus router system in the truck as well as an RME MADI Bridge system.
With this router system they were able to switch stages between artists with literally one click. For the finale they decided to us feeds from both stages at once – but thanks to the backup system and the comprehensive routing, the Soundtruck was able to handle it easily.
It total they recorded 380 gigabytes of music and 280 gigabytes of audience, presenters and more, totaling over 600 gigabytes of audio. This was supplied to DVD authoring company Metropolis Studios London as BWAV files and the video was rendered down to Quicktime for the visuals.
(GB)